


It's Not Cosmetic

by withasideofangst



Series: The Scars We Carry [1]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Iron Man - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: (but not actual alcoholism), AKA Tony Stark people, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Arguing, Bruce Banner Cooks, Bruce Is a Good Bro, Burns, Ceiling Vent Clint Barton, Chronic Pain, Concussions, Cooking, Dead Phil Coulson, Domestic Avengers, Drug Addiction, Engineering Coma, Flashbacks, Gen, Hacking, Hopeful Ending, I ret-conned CA2 and IM3 and Thor 2, Identity Porn, Identity Reveal, Idiots, Intervention, Major Character Injury, Misunderstandings, More or less IM and IM2 compliant, Necessary drug addiction, Not A Fix-It, Not Marvel Cinematic Universe Phase Two Compliant, Painkillers, Perceived Alcoholism, Pillow Fights, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Science Bros, Secret Identity, Secret Identity Fail, Self Confidence Issues, Team Bonding, Temporary Character Death, Tony makes Bad Decisions, Trust Issues, more hopeful than happy, no bots were harmed in the making of this fic, some household appliances may have been harmed in the making of this fic however
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-22
Updated: 2015-07-25
Packaged: 2018-03-31 19:04:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 20
Words: 32,997
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3989272
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/withasideofangst/pseuds/withasideofangst
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Afghanistan and Iron Man, SHIELD gave Tony a choice. He could out himself as Iron Man, or claim it was a bodyguard, and hide his face from the world.</p>
<p>Agent Agent never said anything, but Tony had hacked SHIELD's servers and knew they wanted him to go the bodyguard route. Yes to Iron Man and no to Tony Stark, and all that.</p>
<p>That, as well as keeping Pepper safe, made him go with the bodyguard cover, and flimsy as he thought it was, no one questioned it.</p>
<p>Of course, why would they? Tony Stark was no superhero.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>Although, it's less easy to keep a secret identity with a bunch of superheroes and spies living in your house.</p>
<p>---</p>
<p>Now being translated into Russian!</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Move-In Day

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Русский available: [It's Not Cosmetic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5521091) by [Sumiregava](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sumiregava/pseuds/Sumiregava)



> Okay, it's my brother's birthday so instead of releasing this with the last chapter of Crosshairs, I'm giving you it a little early. (Or, excuses excuses, I'm just a really impatient person. Oops.)
> 
> This is the haven't-completely-written-it fic. I have skeletoned the plot, so no matter what, I will finish this. I shall not abandon you all, I swear. The nice thing about this is, I know where I mean to have the story go, but I can take your comments/feedback into account, and I will alter the plot if people mention ideas/wishes I hadn't thought of which I like more. Worst case, I'll write it how I intended, and you'll still get a finished fic.
> 
> Now, this is a whump-heavy fic, because with the premise being Tony's really injured after Afghanistan (it'll talk more about his injuries later), it's not exactly going to be fluffy. I will admit my first instinct was to kinda kill people off, but my beta kinda went for my head, so now I'm not planning on that. This isn't a fix-it though - I can't just undo the injuries he has, but as much as I can, I am shooting (currently) for a hopeful ending. I hope you all like it.
> 
> (Nah, I'm totally going to be dodging pitchforks. ;P It's a sign of love, I know... -flees-)

After Afghanistan and Iron Man, SHIELD gave Tony a choice. He could out himself as Iron Man, or claim it was a bodyguard, and hide his face from the world.  
  
Agent Agent had never said anything, but Tony had hacked SHIELD's servers and knew they wanted him to go the bodyguard route. Yes to Iron Man and no to Tony Stark, and all that.  
  
That, as well as keeping Pepper safe, made him go with the bodyguard cover, and flimsy as he thought it was, no one questioned it.  
  
Of course, why would they? Tony Stark was no superhero.  
  
\---  
  
After Afghanistan, Tony hadn't escaped unscathed. The Iron Man suit wasn't cosmetic - not all of it, anyway. There was the arc reactor in his chest, of course, but the suit did in fact make it easier to breathe, and assisted in his movements, giving Iron Man an easy, if slightly robotic, gait which Tony Stark had to work harder to fake.  
  
And then there were the scars.  
  
The only reason Tony Stark was still the public's unmarked playboy was due to some very advanced engineering by Stark himself.  
  
The facial-disguising masks had instantly been bought out by SHIELD when he'd decided to produce the technology for them, but the one he had was a higher quality than those he sent them. To an extremely keen eye, knowing what to look for, theirs were detectable. His was not. Even once the Avengers were formed and he had to keep the disguiser on permanently when not in the suit, Natasha and Barton, the two best spies SHIELD had ever had, hadn't been able to detect his mask.  
  
It'd been harder to produce something similar to the face disguiser for his arms and hands which could keep up the illusion even when holding things, but eventually he succeeded. The disguisers couldn't do anything about tactile touch, however, and Tony had never been more relieved to already have a history of being unwilling to be handed things.  
  
Now that evolved into not being touched.  
  
He had a contract with one very discreet escort service which he used to make sure Tony Stark always still had someone on his arm, but his date was always under the strictest instructions to avoid any and all skin-to-skin contact, and would even occasionally help intercept anyone else trying to get too close to Tony.  
  
And of course, all of them were paid handsomely enough to swear under oath that yes, they'd had intercourse with Mr. Stark, and he'd lived up to his reputation, thank you your honor.  
  
Tony had been a little nervous about the Avengers finding out, so he'd had to set a few ground rules when he invited them into new Avengers Tower.  
  
"Hey, if it isn't my favorite group of superheroes," Tony said, ignoring the slightly irritated looks he got in return. Those were commonplace for Tony Stark.  
  
  
"I'm sure Iron Man passed on the offer, but you're all welcome to stay here. You each have your own floor, and there's a gym on another floor, a lab for Dr. Banner on another, this is the communal kitchen and common area, and you've all got smaller kitchens on your floors too. If you need anything, let me know, or buy it yourself. These," he threw small envelopes at each Avenger, "are your access cards for the building. If you'll put your thumbs on the back of the card - yes like that - JARVIS now has your biosignatures, and no one can use those cards except you all. And there are your new credit cards, use them, there's no limit, although I've been warned about you," Tony pointed at Barton, who half-stepped back for a moment, slightly startled by being singled out during the speed talking, "and if you start buying suspicious things for pranking me, JARVIS will block the purchase. You've been warned. Now, any questions?"  
  
The four Avengers present (Thor had returned to Asgard but had a floor in case he came back later) stared for a moment, caught for the first time in a Stark speech. Steve was looking at his black credit card with a slightly appalled look, while Barton seemed to be trying not to leer at his.  
  
"Good. Then, just a few house rules, and I'll let JARVIS show you to your apartments. Which, right, introductions. Avengers, meet JARVIS, he's my AI," Tony said, and paused for a moment when Captain America looked confused.

 

“Please to meet you,” JARVIS said politely.

 

The four of them jumped, Natasha and Barton’s hands twitched towards their weapons.  
  
"AI, like Artificial Intelligence?" Steve asked.  
  
Tony winced internally.  
  
"Right, you were a Capsicle for seventy years, sorry. Yes, J's an AI. No, Barton, he isn't going to go Skynet," he added, seeing the look on the agent's face which he recognized as his I'm-holding-in-a-joke face. "Don't worry about the reference," he added back to the Captain, "he runs the house, and Iron Man's armor, and he's in all your phones. Oh, right."  
  
He tossed them each a new StarkPhone in a new model that wouldn't be on the market for six months. Plus Avengers add-ons and higher security settings than would appear on the open market for several more years.  
  
"Phones. JARVIS is in them, just ask him if you can't figure out how to use them. There's a tutorial in there too, for the technologically-deprived among us," he said, specifically not looking at the Captain. "Battery lasts two months without a charge, we're working on that, and they're bullet-proof, water-proof, fire-proof, et cetera, but don't microwave them," Tony looked at Barton again, and a slightly guilty expression crossed his face. "Yeah, I know you thought of it."  
  
"Mr. Stark," the Captain cut in, only to be headed off my Tony frantically waving his arms in front of him.  
  
"No, no no no no no. No. Dear Old Dad," he said quickly, but the scorn was apparent in his voice and the Captain flinched slightly at it, "was Mr. Stark. Call me Tony. Besides, you're, like, ninety. You can't call me Mr. Stark." He mock-shuddered.  
  
The Captain sighed slightly.  
  
"Fine, Tony, this is...too much. You're housing us, and giving us phones, and - "  
  
Tony waved him off.  
  
"I'm a billionaire, and sure, a lot of that goes to charity now, but I spent most of my life building weapons which ended up blowing up plenty of innocents. I've got blood on my hands, more than any of you, even our resident spies-slash-master assassins over there. Building Iron Man and housing the Avengers is the best thing I've done with my life. So take the damn cards and the phones."  
  
All four Avengers looked slightly flabbergasted by his rushed outburst, and he rewound quickly, wringing his hands.  
  
"Right, so that's over. Let's not do that again. J, where was I? Oh right. Couple house rules. One, Iron Man lives here too, but you might not see him around all the time. Yes, I know who he is, but his identity is a secret to everyone else. I won't tell you who he is. If you want to know, you'll have to ask him, but he probably won't tell you. As long as you live here, you can't try to find out who he is by spying on him or whatever it is you spies do. It's his choice." Tony swallowed, glancing away for a moment.  
  
"Second, no one goes in my workshop without me or Iron Man present. If nothing else, you're all liable to blow something up in there. JARVIS' security settings _will_ attack anyone in there without permission, so, you've been warned." Tony shrugged, serious but trying not to show it.  
  
"And the last thing," he added, his face going stiff for a moment, "I _really_ don't like being touched. I know Fury gave you all my file, you know at least a little of what happened, so, yeah. Don't touch me. That's not a joke, if you do, I can't have you under my roof. I'm not going to pull landlord status on you guys, but it's my home too and just - don't," he trailed off, holding himself stiffly and avoiding looking at their eyes.  
  
After a moment, the Captain nodded.  
  
"Thanks, Mr. St- _Tony_. We'll follow your rules. And call me Steve," he added. For a moment, his hand raised slightly and it looked like he was going to offer a handshake, then he thought better of it and lowered his hand.  
  
The other three nodded their agreement.  
  
"Good," Tony said, and tried to hide his relief. "Then, J will show you to your floors, and I've got to get back to my workshop. I'll send Iron Man around later."  
  
He left via the second elevator which sped directly down to his workshop, and let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding, some of the tension leaving his shoulders.  
  
"Hey, J?"  
  
"Yes, sir?"  
  
"Maybe this will work out okay," he said.

 


	2. The Offer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I'm drafting chapter 5 now, so you all don't have to worry yet about me not being able to update often. I'm thinking as long as I have a few chapters' buffer, I'll update either weekly or twice-weekly (like my finished fics), based on how much I managed to write/edit (based on feedback) that week. This one probably won't be quite as scheduled as my completed fics' updates (the new one will continue the roughly-Sunday/Wednesday update schedule), but we'll see.
> 
> I'm updating the tags as I post more chapters, so if you see something you think I missed tagging, let me know. 
> 
> This one is part of the initial set-up, so sorry for no action scenes yet, but we'll get there.

Iron Man groaned softly, and a static-like noise filtered through the helmet’s voice scrambler.

Steve glanced at him from where he sprawled on the couch, having just pulled off his helmet.

“You okay, Iron Man?”

Natasha and Barton looked up from where they were sprawled on various couches, Barton getting his side patched up by Bruce, who didn’t look away from the stitches.

Apparently they didn’t see anything too wrong with his posture, as they both looked away fairly quickly.

“I’m fine, Cap,” Tony said.  “I’m just a little banged up.  Nothing I can’t handle.”

Steve visibly hesitated.

“How do you…” he paused and trailed off, “are you able to get out of that? To get looked at?”

Iron Man’s mask must have turned Tony’s calculating gaze into a fairly imposing stare, as Steve shifted uncomfortably while he watched.

The question was out of concern, not trying to figure out who he was, Tony decided.

“Yeah,” he said slowly, “I can get looked over.  I’ll have Stark take a look before he looks over the suit.”

Steve nodded, looking mostly satisfied, but Tony saw Bruce frowning at him out of the corner of the suit’s cameras.

He could still feel Bruce’s gaze as he left the room.  He hadn’t reached the elevator before he heard soft steps behind him.

“Wait, uh,” Bruce said, and Tony turned around.  He looked very hesitant, and still a little shaken from the battle.

Tony waited.

“I know you want to keep your identity secret, and I-I’m not asking you to change that,” he said nervously, “but if you need someone to look at your injuries, I’ll help if I can.  You wouldn’t need to tell me who you are.”

Behind the mask, Tony smiled slightly.  They hadn’t fought together many times yet, but Iron Man trusted the Hulk to have his back, and Bruce Banner and Tony Stark had got along well the few times he’d come around without the suit.

“I thought you said you weren’t that kind of doctor, Doc,” Tony said, and he guessed some of the lighter tone must have come through the filter when Bruce looked a little relieved.  The man still seemed nervous around Iron Man when he wasn’t the Hulk.

“I’m not,” Bruce replied, but the corner of his mouth twitched upward into a small smile.  “However, if the rest of these guys won’t let anyone else look at their injuries, I’m the closest thing they have.  I know Mr. Stark maintains the suit, but I don’t think any of his doctorates are medicinal, so...if there’s something he can’t fix, I’ll look at it if you want me to.”

Tony’s throat felt full for a second, and he swallowed before replying.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said seriously.

Bruce gave him a slightly larger smile.

“Call me Bruce.”

Tony nodded and turned back towards the elevator.

“Oh, Bruce?” He called over his shoulder, “Stark would tell you to call him Tony.”

“You don’t,” Bruce called back.

Tony paused in front of the elevator.

“Well, he’s my boss.  Not yours.”

\---

Half an hour later, Tony was sitting in the middle of his workshop, the glass walls blacked out on privacy mode.  Pieces of the suit lay around him, but he was ignoring them, slumped against the wall and breathing hard as he stitched up a cut in his arm where the suit had been dented and cut into his skin.

His skin felt like fire where the air touched it.  His suit usually filtered the air and injected him with painkillers when he needed them (which was far more than he would like to admit), but he couldn’t take the painkillers while he was stitching himself up.  They sometimes made his hands shake.

Once he was done bandaging up his cuts, he took the painkillers and had JARVIS start repairing the suit.  Nothing had been critically damaged, so JARVIS didn’t need him for the repairs.

So Tony pulled on a form-fitting shirt and pants, similar to the undersuit he wore beneath the armor, which he wore when he wanted to sleep.  It was made from a fabric which, to a lesser extent, provided the same filtering effect as the armor.

He wore it whenever he could as Tony Stark, but it was too risky to wear out in public much.  He _really_ needed to work on that.

He could sometimes pull them off with a long sleeved t-shirt or button-down, and he wore them to sleep since he still had yet to find a way to make sleeping in the suit even a little comfortable.

Over them, he pulled on sweatpants and a sweatshirt and turned back on the disguisers on his hands, just in case someone was pounding at the door when he woke up, and he pulled an undamaged helmet on his head, to make breathing easier.

He’d learned to be prepared from a number of close calls.

Supervillains could have _horrible_ timing, who knew?  They seemed to have a sense of when he was about to go to sleep.

And Tony hated sleeping.  He avoided it for as long as he could, but he’d been running for going on 59 hours, and after the fight earlier, he had to give in.  Even so, the constant pain he was in always prevented him from falling asleep, so he grabbed one of hundreds of tiny injectors he’d made and stored in a locked cabinet.  They were tiny, circular, and made of metal, no bigger than a button, but held a dosage of a sedative strong enough to knock Tony out for a night.

He lay down on the couch and closed his eyes, placing the injector against the back of his hand, tapping the back so it began releasing the sedative, which seeped into him through his skin, no needle required.

He was out within seconds.

 


	3. Missing and Catching

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was actually going to be two shorter chapters but I wanted to move the plot along and they worked together, so you get a two-for-one.
> 
> I'm still doing well on writing this one well ahead so unless you all really steer me in a different direction, I've got a nice buffer. :)
> 
> New actually-already-finished fic just went up, too! I'll probably keep updating the two fics together unless I can't for whatever reason.

When Tony Stark walked back into the Avengers’ common floor, he wasn’t wearing the suit.

(Beneath his long-sleeved, worn-out Black Sabbath shirt and well-worn jeans, he was still wearing the form-fitting clothing which helped dull the screaming pain of the air into something tolerable, with the painkillers.  Anywhere his skin threatened to be visible, he had the disguisers on.)

Barton was perched on the back of a sturdy set of shelves Tony had installed after noticing the archer’s preference for high places.  It was positioned so he could see nearly the entire room without moving.

He made a mental note to add something like rope hammocks to the room, from where he could watch movies with the rest of the team, since the shelves didn’t look that comfortable, and Barton spent more time there than he’d anticipated.

Rogers - _Steve_ \- had staked claim to one of the couches, lying across it with a file in his lap, reading.  (SHIELD files, Tony would guess.  The guy needed to learn how to relax.)

Natasha was cleaning her knives and guns on a coffee table, and Bruce was nowhere to be seen, but judging from the smells coming from the kitchen, it was his turn to cook.

They all glanced up when he entered the room.

“Tony,” Steve acknowledged with a nod.  Tony could read a flicker of surprise in his face - he didn’t come around all that often, and he’d overheard several SHIELD agents telling the Avengers about how Tony Stark was considered a PTSD-suffering recluse.

Now he guessed they’d believed it.

“Hey, Spangles,” he said, keeping his voice light and relaxed.

Steve twitched at the name, and frowned, but didn’t reply.

Barton, however, snorted in a bad attempt at covering a laugh.

Natasha looked up from her knives again for a moment, and Tony let out a breath slowly when she went back to her task.

Deciding not to poke that particular red-haired bear, Tony walked into the kitchen to poke a sometimes-green bear instead.

“Hey, Brucie,” he said, grinning when Bruce turned his head to look at his intruder.

“Dinner’s almost ready.  Are you joining us?” Bruce asked without pausing his stirring.

Tony didn’t recognize whatever he was cooking, but it smelled great.

“Ah,” Tony said, trying to stall and hide his surprise, and failing as the grin slipped from his face for a split second.

Judging from the slight crease between Bruce’s eyes, he’d caught the lapse.

“I don’t want to intrude.”

“It’s not a bother,” Bruce said at the same time.

They both looked at each other for a moment, then Tony plastered a grin on his face again.

“Ah, well, you should’ve just said you missed me, Brucie,” Tony said, breaking the awkward pause, bowling over Bruce’s look of confusion for a moment, and out of an old habit, he reached out to clasp Bruce’s shoulder before dropping his hand instead, passing the gesture off as a wide wave of his arm.

He stayed back from Bruce’s work space while he finished cooking, but kept up a constant stream of speech, Bruce replying when Tony paused for breath.

Bruce wasn’t lying, it wasn’t long before dinner was done, and he enlisted Tony’s help to carry out the stew while Bruce grabbed a salad bowl.  (Tony ignored the slight increase in pain as he held the pot handles.)

The other three Avengers jumped to their feet when they set the dishes down, and Bruce waved Barton into the kitchen to get plates and silverware.  Steve followed him to get water glasses, and Tony faked pouring himself some brandy, actually pouring in a similarly-colored alcohol-less drink he kept behind the other bottles.  He’d learned early on that alcohol didn’t mix well with his painkillers.

Tony Stark’s reputation as nearly-alcohol hadn’t done him any favors there, and he’d considered letting a rumor slip that he’d given up alcohol, until he’d taken a too-strong dose of painkillers one night and when Pepper had woken him the next morning, she’d remarked that his behavior had been very similar to when he’d been drinking.

So he kept the alcohol-less liquid on hand as just another cover.

He carefully slipped the liquid back among the many bottles before offering a real drink to the others.

Steve passed, frowning slightly at the drink in Tony’s hand, but Barton accepted and Natasha walked over and helped herself to one of his better-quality vodkas.  (He’d stocked up after she moved in without ever asking, along with a few other drinks he’d discovered were popular in Russia.  She’d never said anything, for which he was grateful, but he thought she’d noticed.)

Then they were all seated and eating, and Tony realized he’d really missed this - people.

It had been a long time since he’d been this close to people he (mostly) trusted, aside from Pepper and Rhodey, and neither of them stayed around the tower much, even before the Avengers had moved in.

He suspected they didn’t like seeing how he’d become after Afghanistan.  There was only so much either of them could take of seeing his newest addiction, and he knew he’d passed that a while ago.

He couldn’t exactly blame either of them.  He’d changed a little for the better after the Avengers, but that didn’t stop his addiction.

Tony had no plans to ever tell the Avengers that he was Iron Man, or about his injuries.  He didn’t want to lose _this_ too.

They sat around the table for hours, Barton and Tony trading jokes until Steve and Bruce were in stitches and even Natasha was smiling.

Tony could swear he even got a chuckle or two out of her.

And of course, that’s when the alarm rang for the Avengers.

The others were up and running for their gear, Steve apologizing to Tony, but Tony waved them off, walking quickly to the second elevator.

“I’ll send Iron Man out as soon as he’s ready,” he says as the doors close.

\---

The Avengers had barely started fighting when Iron Man rocketed by overhead, neatly picking off four aliens who were about to jump Captain America from behind.

Steve turned around just in time to see the red-and-gold blur whip past.

“Sorry I’m late,” the robotic voice spoke via the coms.

“What took you so long?” Barton called back, shooting down an alien trying to sneak up on Natasha.

“What, you miss me?”

“Guys, focus,” Steve said, and Tony could practically feel him sigh in annoyance.

Iron Man flew above the fight again, the sensors in his suit picking out a dozen targets at once and firing, hitting each one.

“Aww, Winghead’s no fun,” he said, grinning, and had the pleasure of watching Captain America definitely do a double-take at the nickname.

“You - what -” Steve spluttered, as he bashed another alien with his shield.

“Hey, I think you broke Cap,” Barton said, clearly grinning.  “Good job, Iron Ma-”

Tony turned in midair when Barton’s voice cut off, and caught a dark blur falling off the edge of a building, overrun by half a dozen of the aliens.

The sensors in the suit pointed out exactly which of the aliens had managed to grab Barton’s bow.

“ _Barton_!”  Steve and Natasha yelled over the coms earpiece.

“Shit,” he said, jerking to a stop and reversing his direction, pumping up the power in his repulsors and then decreasing at the last moment so he wouldn’t break any of Barton’s bones when he grabbed him.

He caught him with more than fifty feet to spare, coming out of the dive in a barrel roll and then straightening out to lower Barton to the ground, not even stopping before pitching back up into a vertical rise.

“Iron Man,” Barton said, sounding distinctly rattled and a little _off_ , “if you ever do a roll while you’ve got me in the air again, I’ll stick an arrow in your eyehole.”

“Barton?”  Steve asked.

“Give me a second, ugh, I’m going to puke,” he said, but he raised a hand in acknowledgement when Tony made another pass over his head, dropping the retrieved bow beside him.

“He’s okay, Winghead, just a little dizzy,” Tony joked, grinning, before diving back into the fray.

He had to grab Steve when he was punched out the side of the building and he grabbed a falling Barton two more times before the fight ended.

After the fight, he landed next to Barton and was yelling at him about how the stupid idiot couldn’t seem to stay on a building for more than five minutes when he realized the Avengers were all grinning at him.

“ _What_?” He asked, annoyed.

“You really are a team player,” Steve said, grinning, and Tony was glad the mask hid his slack-jawed expression.

He settled for giving a loose two-fingered salute and rocketing off back towards the tower.

When, a week later, Iron Man walked in on Steve going over footage from every fight the Avengers had taken part in, including Loki’s invasion, with Maria Hill in the common floor, he caught a glimpse of the wormhole on someone’s shaky cell phone footage, and prompted went pale behind his mask, spun on his heel, and walked back out.

Not one commented on it, but Iron Man didn’t come around for about a week after that, and Tony Stark kept busy with SI projects and Avengers tech in his workshop.

The wormhole hadn’t made as much as an impact on him, physically or emotionally, as Afghanistan, but he still tended to lock himself away for long stretches of time if it came up, JARVIS and the bots keeping him company.

At least the Avengers didn’t question him about it, and when Iron Man and Tony Stark emerged again, they went on with business as usual.

 


	4. For Science

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wait, everyone is happy in this chapter?
> 
> SOMETHING MUST BE TERRIBLY WRONG.
> 
> In other news, I've written/planned most of the fic (barring feedback changes) and I am a horrible person and this is going to be fun. ^____________^
> 
> I can't wait to get to chapters 6 and 7. Soooo...I'll instigate the double-update offer again. Which, for those of you who haven't read Crosshairs, means if this chapter gets five comments from different, not-me people before the end of Wednesday, you'll get another chapter when that happens and the Wednesday chapter on time.

The next two months passed without the world needing the Avengers, and eventually Tony was hard-pressed to keep finding excuses for Iron Man just hanging around the tower, so he and Iron Man kept more and more to the workshop.

So when one of the special projects he’d been working on since the Avengers moved in finished, he went to Bruce’s floor as himself.

He knocked on the door, then bounced nervously on the balls of his feet as he waited for Bruce to come to the door.

When he did, he blinked to find Tony on his doorstep.

“Tony?  Do you need something?”

Tony grinned, and caught the briefest look of apprehension on Bruce’s face.  (He was learning.)

“I’ve got something for you, Brucie-boo,” he said, and Bruce rolled his eyes.

“Okay, Tony,” he said obligingly, walking out into the hallway and closing the door behind him, then following as Tony practically bounced over to the elevator.

Tony was quiet (for once) on the way down, until the elevator _pinged_ at one of the previously-empty mid-levels, beneath all the Avengers’ floors, with a few floors as a buffer just in case of new arrivals.

When he herded Bruce out onto the floor, he almost walked into his back when Bruce came to a sudden halt.

“If you don’t like it, it’s fine, I can redo it, or get rid of it, or - “ Tony started, rambling, until Bruce held up a hand to silence him, before slowly turning around.

“You built this?” He asked, his voice awed.

Tony shifted from foot to foot.  He _really_ didn’t do well with gratitude, and had a feeling that’s where this was heading.

“Ah, yeah, I mean, you seemed really bored, I know I would be if I were you, and I just -”

Bruce stopped him again.

“I get the feeling you don’t like hearing it, but _thank you_ , Tony,” he said, still sounding awed, before turning back and walking over to some of the tables set up.

The whole floor had been turned into a giant laboratory, filled with as much state-of-the-art equipment as Tony could fit onto the tables, pulling data from the papers Bruce had written before the Hulk in order to figure out what equipment was needed for the research he’d done (of course, these machines were all newer that what he’d had at the time), plus more for genetic research and medicinal research and any other pet-project Tony could dig up which Bruce had been a part of in the last decade or so.

Plus he’d had the walls painted in calming shades of blue and grey, getting rid of some of the “lab” look, which he’d suspected Bruce might not find as appealing after the business with the Hulk.

“Oh, ah, since the Avengers seem to use you as a doctor, too,” Tony added, and Bruce stopped staring around long enough to meet his eyes again, “the floor below has been outfitted with hospital equipment, since none of the idiots seem to be willing to go to a hospital.  And I’ve seen SHIELD’s _hospitals_ , they’re a joke, so…”

He trailed off, seeing Bruce’s intense stare.

“Uh, Bruce?”

Bruce blinked.

“I know you said you’ve got blood on your hands, but Tony, _this_?  You care more than you let on.  You send your bodyguard out on missions with the Avengers more than you actually keep him around you, you bankroll us, and now…”

Bruce also trailed off, still staring, and Tony avoided his gaze.

“Er, okay, too many feelings here, could we not?”  He asked, awkwardly, then pressed forward as Bruce opened his mouth.  “Great, good, let’s not.  How about you actually test some of these things out, I don’t know what half this stuff is for, I just read your notes…”

Neither of them left the floor for hours.

Finally, Steve went looking for them when neither showed up to dinner, and found both of them hunched over something bubbling in a vial over an open flame, speed-talking in sentences he didn’t know more than half the words of, neither even noticing his presence when he walked in.

It took him five minutes to get them to focus on him long enough to drag them away from their project.

“But we’re doing _science_ ,” Tony protested as Steve herded them both back up to the common floor.

Bruce walked next to him, also being herded out, with the first real smile on his face that Tony had seen since he moved in.

 


	5. Idiots and Softies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, you guys got the five comments really quickly! I think that's the fastest it's ever been reached. So, here you go!
> 
> Okay, Iron Man does something a little ooc but it was awwdorable and I had to. And while it's not something Tony could do, Iron Man can.
> 
> And two chapters of me being nice to people, you should be scared. I've included a small preview of the next chapter in the end notes.

The Avengers had been on several missions, during which Iron Man had caught each of the Avengers (aside from the Hulk) more than once, falling or jumping off buildings, trains, exploding enemy planes, and once, memorably, a giant squid (Tony had finally given up on ever getting the ink out of all the cracks of that suit, and traces remained until he’d replaced the suit entirely with the next version), before he’d ever really come into contact with the Hulk on-mission.

And so when he found himself face-to-face with the big guy, he was frozen for just a fraction of a second before he found his voice.

“Hey, Hulkmeister,” he said, turning on the outside speakers of his suit so the Hulk could hear him, and the Hulk paused while lifting a car over his head.

It was almost comical.

“We could use your help over there,” he said, pointing over one shoulder, his other hand on his hip as he kept the repulsors in his boots on, keeping even with the Hulk’s eye level and his posture relaxed, non-threatening.

The Hulk narrowed his eyes at him and growled slightly.

“Yeah, hey, remember me, the amazingly awesome Iron Man, I’m your friend, so could you please, uh, put down the car?”

The Hulk stared for a moment longer, and then, surprisingly, actually dropped the car before running off in the direction Tony had pointed.

“Well, okay, that happened,” Tony muttered to himself, before telling the others they had a Hulk incoming.

Only Iron Man seemed to be able to get the Hulk to consistently listen mid-mission, so in addition to being air support, he was also given Hulk-herding duty as needed.

Luckily, the guy seemed to like the “Shiny Man,” as he referred to Iron Man.

He’d just finished herding him during another fight when he heard “Iron Man, heads up!”

Which was all the warning he got before spotting Captain America jump off the roof of a building, which exploded seconds later.

Iron Man caught him just above the ground, groaning slightly from the added drag, adjusting for it in his steering.

“Seriously, you guys have to stop leaping off things,” he grumbled.

“You’re always there to catch us, Shellhead,” Steve remarked, and he heard the others make noises of agreement in his ear.

Tony rolled his eyes.

“And I will be, until you don’t give me any warning at all and I’m too far away,” he muttered.

“Hasn’t happened yet,” Barton called back, and Tony deposited Steve on another rooftop with more bad guys, before whipping back around to provide aid to Natasha.

“Idiots.  I’m on a team of idiots,” he muttered, not realizing the coms were still on until Natasha nodded at him in agreement.

“That includes you,” she commented dryly.

“Of course it does,” Tony replied, rolling his eyes and blasting another enemy into oblivion.

When they got back to the tower, Tony wasn’t seriously injured, so he stuck around while the others kicked back or patched themselves up.

No one was injured enough to need medical attention they couldn’t provide themselves, so Bruce was passed out on a couch, wrapped up in blankets.

They turned on the television, although no one was really paying attention to what was on, just flipping to a movie channel and leaving it on as background noise.

Finally, restless, Tony got up and while the others watched him walk out, probably thinking he was leaving again, he instead walked into the kitchen and when he was very sure no one was following him, he peeled off his gauntlets and pulled on gloves made from the same material as his air-filtering clothes, and set about making hot chocolate for the others, a drink he’d seen them making several times when they needed to wind-down.

(If he was being entirely honest, many of the times he’d seen it was actually over the tower’s cameras while he sat down in his workshop, since he rarely stuck around after fights, taking most of the hits from his position in the air.  But he’d spotted it once or twice as Iron Man, and so felt okay acting on it.  When he’d mentioned the Avengers’ habit to Pepper, she’d laughed and called them all big softies.)

He pulled the gauntlets back on when he was done, before calling Natasha, the least scraped up of them (aside from the sleeping Bruce), in to help carry the drinks, as he could only manage two ( _very_ carefully) while in the suit.

Her eyes widened slightly when she saw the drinks.

“I wouldn’t have expected this of you,” she remarked quietly.  “You keep trying to play the lone wolf, and then this.”

Tony shrugged awkwardly in the suit, brushing off the comment.  It certainly wasn’t something Tony Stark would do, but it was something Iron Man could.

(Besides, Pepper kept telling him he needed to do something to bond with the Avengers more.)

“Figured you all could use a break.”

They carried out the drinks to the others, Natasha keeping one for herself and giving the other to Barton while Tony handed one to Steve and placed the other on the coffee table next to Bruce for later.

(Thor hadn’t been in town since Loki’s invasion, so although Tony kept track of him in London and the occasional times he’d made appearances in fights on the news there, they hadn’t seen him in person since.)

He caught the slightly guilty look Steve threw him when he thought he wasn’t looking, glancing at the mug and probably realizing Iron Man couldn’t join them.

He let it pass since Steve didn’t say anything, and sat on a (reinforced for that purpose) couch with the others for another couple hours before returning to the workshop.

Dammit, Iron Man was just a big softie, too.

(Not that he’d ever admit it, to himself or anyone else, out loud.)

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In Wednesday's chapter:
> 
> The two agents took a moment to reflect on exactly how many things JARVIS was installed in, and both got a slightly hunted look on their faces.
> 
> “I get the feeling we don’t want to force your interference,” Natasha said slowly, while Barton nodded in agreement.
> 
> “That would be for the best,” JARVIS agreed, then fell silent again.


	6. Sneakery

When the Avengers weren’t on mission, Tony spent most of his time either walking around in the suit or in Bruce’s lab (when he wasn’t in his own workshop, fixing the suit or making new toys for the Avengers).

(Although the suction-cup arrows for Barton were such a mistake.  Never.  Again.  The damn things left marks that looked like hickeys, too, which Barton found _hilarious_.)

When Barton and Natasha were sure that Tony was going to be in the lab with Bruce for a while (working on creating some new medicine, Bruce had said before Tony swept him out the door, something to do with treating burns), they started working on breaking House Rule Number One.

(To be fair, they reasoned, they were respecting rules two and three, so far.  And if Iron Man and Tony Stark didn’t want spies trying to dig up their secrets, they shouldn’t have invited them to live in their house.  Tower.  Whatever.  They were both far too good at their jobs to pay any attention to the slightly guilty feeling that ran through their heads when they decided to begin.)

And so Barton found himself squeezing through a few tight spaces in the air vents, while Natasha did...something.  He wasn’t actually sure exactly what she was up to, and knew better than to ask.

All that Barton could discover was that the only places with access restricted from the Avengers were Tony’s floor, which was the third floor from the top (beneath the landing pads and the common floor), and the sub-basements, whose vents were far too small for a person to crawl through.

(Barton hadn’t expected to run into the restricted area when he did, which had resulted in a fifty-foot freefall through the vents, after which it had taken him over an hour to crawl back out, supporting his weight against the walls of the very narrow vent, nursing a sprained ankle all the way.)

Natasha didn’t find anything either, finding the restricted areas similarly difficult to break into.

They both waited for Barton’s ankle to heal before trying again, all the while fairly certain their prying had either gone unnoticed or was being tolerated, as Tony wasn’t even looking at them oddly when he made his rare appearances on the common floor.

They were under this assumption through their second, and equally unsuccessful, attempt, and might have continued to be so if their third attempt hadn’t gone awry.

Natasha had managed to pry the second elevator doors open, which all the Avengers had seen both Tony Stark and Iron Man disappear into on several occasions, but which none of the Avengers could operate other than Iron Man.

She’d then climbed down the cables to Tony’s floor (wisely deciding to start from the common floor in order to avoid the need to travel up the cables), and then had been halfway through trying to force the doors open from the inside when the elevator had begun moving, resulting in her being stuck clinging onto the thin inner frame of the elevator doors while the cables were moving far too fast to hold onto.

This wouldn’t have been such a horrible situation for the assassin if she weren’t wearing gloves, useful for sliding down the cables, but not so useful for clinging to narrow surfaces.

As her grip slackened, she was beginning to really get concerned when JARVIS’ voice sounded through the elevator shaft.

“Agent Romanov,” he began, and she flinched, “I have called for help, please stand by and he will be with you in a moment.”

She cursed under her breath, bringing her forehead against the side wall, and just hoped JARVIS didn’t call Steve.  His Captain America is Disappointed in You face worked even on her, not that she let him know that.

Or worse, if he called -

“Hello, Agent Romanov.”

She winced internally.   _How_ did he manage to make a robotic voice sound amused?

“Could you just get me out of here?” She asked, glancing over her shoulder at Iron Man, floating level with her in the elevator shaft, repulsors in his boots keeping him level while he crossed his arms and tilted his head, clearly finding humor in her predicament.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and although his voice came out even, Natasha just knew he was still holding back amusement.

Even so, he was surprisingly gentle as he lifted her off the wall, and kept one arm wrapped around her, secure but respectful, as he flew her back to the common floor, where he released her and then stepped back.

She turned when she heard shifting behind her, and found Steve and Barton already in the room.  Both had clearly been sitting on the couches, Steve watching the news and Barton reading something on his phone, but they both looked up when she and Iron Man came in.

She had to admit, getting carried in by a red and gold suit of armor wasn’t exactly _subtle_.

“What happened?” Steve asked, looking a little worried, but Natasha saw Barton stifling laughter next to him.

She narrowed her eyes slightly at him, and he composed his face into something more appropriate for a funeral, instantly.

“You need to teach me that trick,” Iron Man said quietly enough that she was the only one to hear.  (She suspected Steve heard something, as his eyes narrowed ever so lightly, but probably not the actual words.)

“Well?”  Steve asked, when neither replied for a moment.

“Nothing to worry about, Cap,” Iron Man said, as Natasha opened her mouth to speak, “the agent here was just doing her job.”

Natasha glanced at him, but nothing in his body language (not that she could read much) made her think he was secretly angry.

Steve, however, was frowning more than before.

“What do you mean, _her job_?”  He asked, and Natasha had a feeling he’d guessed what she’d been doing.

“I was -” she began, intending to tell the truth, but Iron Man nudged her in the arm, and facing her in such a way that Steve couldn’t see, he flickered the light in one eye off and on, clearly a wink.

“Don’t worry about it, Cap.  No harm, no fowl.  Just,” he added, obviously addressing both Barton and Natasha, although he only faced her, “if you’re going to try, don’t put yourself in harm’s way.  And it’s not going to work, anyway.”

Then he gave them all a two-finger salute and jumped back into the open elevator shaft, repulsors slowing his descent, after which the doors slid closed.

Natasha turned back to see Steve still frowning at her.

“What did he mean, putting yourself in harm’s way?  And _what_ exactly isn’t going to work?”

“Nothing, Steve, like he said,” she said calmly, keeping her face blank, and while he obviously didn’t believe her, after leveling a stare at both her and Barton, he left the room, shaking his head.

Barton and Natasha looked at each other for a moment, both letting out a breath.

“Didn’t seem as mad as I thought,” Barton remarked.

“No, he didn’t, did he.  I guess he and Stark _did_ realize we weren’t going to just sit around.  Besides, JARVIS has probably been keeping tabs on us, haven’t you, JARVIS?”  Natasha said, glancing up at the ceiling.

(They all knew JARVIS wasn’t actually in the ceiling, but it had become a common habit anyway, among all the Avengers except Iron Man - he and Tony Stark never seemed to glance anywhere when they talked to the AI, just speaking to the air.)

“Yes, Agent Romanov, Mr. Stark has been aware of your and Agent Barton’s attempts to gain access to his floor and the basements,” JARVIS answered calmly.

“And you didn’t stop us?”  Barton asked.

“Neither of you have come close enough to success to force my involvement,” he replied calmly.

Natasha and Barton shared a glance.

“Meaning, if we _had_ come close enough, you would have stopped us?”  Natasha asked cautiously.

“Yes, Agent Romanov,” he replied, still in the same calm tone.

The two agents took a moment to reflect on exactly how many things JARVIS was installed in, and both got a slightly hunted look on their faces.

“I get the feeling we don’t want to force your interference,” Natasha said slowly, while Barton nodded in agreement.

“That would be for the best,” JARVIS agreed, then fell silent again.

Two hours later, both agents had left their phones at home and were in a small coffeeshop far from the tower, a tiny local place with no security cameras.

The took seats in the far back, both sipping their coffees with an air of calmness about them.

“So,” Barton said, taking another sip, and Natasha raised an eyebrow at him.

“We going to stop trying?”

She smiled slowly, dangerously.  Barton had known her for years, but he still had to manually hold back a flinch.

“Not a chance.”

She took out a burner phone freshly bought with cash from a street stall, punching in a number she memorized before leaving the tower.

“Who are you calling?” Barton asked.

“Reinforcements,” she replied, as the phone was picked up on the other end.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just wondering, how many of you actually remembered which rule was House Rule Number One?
> 
> And because I'm clearly unique with chapter names, the next chapter is titled "Reinforcements." Bwahahahaha.


	7. Reinforcements

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hide the mugs.
> 
> A note on my update schedule is in the end notes. (Don't read before the chapter, there's spoilers in there too.)

“FRIENDS!”

The voice boomed through the common floor, and Tony froze where he stood, in the middle of helping Bruce cook dinner again.

He went motionless so quickly, Bruce bumped into his arm, and he failed to hide the resulting flinch, feeling Bruce’s eyes lock on him for a moment, but when he withheld comment, Tony sighed in relief, a quick rush of breath between tightly-clamped lips.

“Oh boy, here we go,” he mumbled under his breath, and he barely heard Bruce breathe a laugh in reply.

Then both of them shared a look, and since the food would survive a moment unattended, they headed out into the living room, Tony quietly muttering an “after you.”

It was his first time officially meeting Thor as Tony Stark, and the other Avengers though he only knew the god of thunder from SHIELD’s files.

“Friend Tony,” Thor declared, turning towards him when Steve introduced them.  “I have heard much of what you have done for the Avengers!  You have my thanks.”

Tony was still muttering a reply when Thor walked over, and Tony barely caught the alarmed widening of the other Avengers’ eyes over Thor’s massive shoulders before the god clapped him on the shoulder, hard.

He couldn’t hide his full-body flinch, and his knees actually gave out for a moment before he straightened again, muscles locked so he wouldn’t scream like he wanted to.

Luckily, none of the other Avengers could see from behind Thor, so only Bruce witnessed the moment.

While Bruce’s brow creased in a concerned frown, Tony said nothing and Thor didn’t seem to think the reaction is unusual (although, Tony could guess that perhaps it wasn’t too unusual - most people probably crumpled a little under a god’s hand), already having turned back to the others.

For the first time, Tony noticed the two women that Thor brought with him, chatting animatedly with Steve while Thor greeted Barton and Natasha.

He also noted the concerned and apologetic glances the Avengers sent his way, knowing that he “doesn’t like being touched.”

It took a minute before Tony was sure he could speak without screaming, so he was glad Bruce stepped up to introduce the two women as Jane, Thor’s girlfriend and a fellow scientist, and Darcy, her intern and friend.

After that particular introduction, Darcy stared, open-mouthed, at Tony until Jane elbowed her in the side.

“I think this is the only time I’ve ever seen her lost for words,” Jane remarked to Tony.

When she didn’t hold out a hand to shake, Tony guessed that the three _had_ actually been warned he didn’t like being touched - which in turn told him this was not a random visit, and he had a sneaking suspicion why the trio was really there.

“I have that effect on people,” Tony remarked back to Jane, pushing aside his suspicions and ignoring the residual additional pain for the moment, while Darcy found her voice.

“Sorry, sorry, it’s just, you’re _Tony Stark_ ,” Darcy gushed, and Tony blinked before turning his camera-worthy smile on her.

“That’s me,” he said, quirking an eyebrow, and distinctly noted Barton rolling his eyes from across the room.

“Can I meet JARVIS?” she asked, and Tony’s smile became a little smaller and a little more real.

“He can hear anything that goes on in this tower.  Say hi, J.”

“Hello, Miss Lewis,” JARVIS said, probably pulling her last name from SHIELD’s files.

Darcy just about died in front of him, and Tony made a mental note to check if Darcy had any experience in programming.  He’d seen the look on her face on many tech nerds’ faces before his kidnapping.  The look only made his suspicions on the trio’s sudden visit grow stronger.

While Darcy kept talking to JARVIS and Jane and Thor joined the others scattered on the couches, Bruce very quietly grunted under his breath to get Tony’s attention, then led him back into the kitchen to finish dinner.

Tony was grateful for the rescue, and said as much with a quietly mumbled “thanks,” before returning his attention to the food.  With only one pair of eyes (which were politely not staring at him, anyway), it took far less effort to hide how much his muscles were still protesting Thor’s clap on the shoulder.

With the addition of three more people, one of them a god, Tony had JARVIS call for several pizzas to supplement the food they cooked, as making more would take far too long.  Bruce thanked him in turn, looking slightly relieved that he wasn’t expected to magic that much additional food into existence.

_That_ told Tony that Bruce had not been in on the plan to bring Thor and the two women to the tower, which further confirmed Tony’s theory that it was Natasha or Barton who invited them.

While they were carrying the food out to the table, JARVIS remarked that the pizza man had arrived in the lobby and left the pizzas with the desk attendant, so Barton and Steve volunteered to go down and get them.

When they got back and dinner began, Tony kept an animated conversation going between himself, Bruce and Jane, which none of the others seemed to be able to follow, until Darcy occasionally threw a word or two in edgewise, and Tony reevaluated his opinion of her intelligence as higher than he’d initially thought, from the fangirling she’d shown with JARVIS.

The others conversed among themselves, not even attempting to understand the “science-babble,” as Barton referred to it, going on at the other end of the table.

When dinner was over, Tony took his leave, saying Iron Man had returned and he’d send him around when he could, to say hello.  Team bonding, and all that.

Then he had JARVIS pull all the information he could find on Darcy while he grabbed more painkillers.

His suspicions were correct.

Although she was a poli-sci major in college, she was a fairly experienced hacker.

Not to his level, of course, but she could probably break into most federal agencies or SHIELD, if given enough time, judging by her track record.

“Smart little spies,” he muttered to himself, sure of Natasha or Barton, likely both, being involved.

But if they thought Darcy could hack JARVIS, they were sadly mistaken.

And of that, he wanted them to be aware of.

“Hey, J,” he said, while he stepped into the Iron Man suit.

“Yes, sir?”

“Have some fun with our little hacker friend here, but make it clear she’s no match for you.”

“It would be my pleasure, sir.  Did you have a little mischief in mind, or Skynet, sir?,” JARVIS replied.

“Oy, less with the sass, I don’t remember coding that into you.”

“I learned from the best, sir.”

Tony grinned.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, Iron Man has a god to play host to.”

“Of course, sir.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> JARVIS is secretly the ultimate sassmaster, don’t let anyone tell you any different.
> 
> Also Tony never answered his question.
> 
> \---  
> Update scheduling:
> 
> I've been busy this week and haven't written more of this or my other WIP fic, so while I have one more chapter after this finished, I'm only about a third of the way through the next one. What this means is, you'll definitely get your mid-week update, but the next one might not get a Sunday update next weekend. I should at least have something by the following Wednesday, and I'll probably even have it by Sunday, I'm just giving a heads-up in case I need it.
> 
> Real life is a bummer, hmm. I've got an actual, not-fun paper to write (which isn't the hard part, the hard part is speed-reading six books to do it), and I've got two part-time jobs to worry about again, so I'm playing it by ear. Worst case scenario, I'll switch to weekly updates. It shouldn't ever get more delayed than that.
> 
> \---
> 
> Next Chapter:
> 
> “Iron Man, report!” Steve called in his ear.
> 
> “Damn, I take that back, the things just got smarter - they’re targeting the buildings!”
> 
> “The area isn’t clear!” Steve shouted back, and his sensors told Tony that Steve had just run into the building.


	8. Character Building

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was originally titled "The Sincerest Form of Flattery" and then my friend, RogueWolf, suggested the title change. So you can blame her.

Darcy groaned in frustration as yet another firewall blocked her path, and Natasha and Barton looked up from their tablets to watcher her groan and push the laptop away.

“Quitting?”  Natasha asked, her voice and face not betraying her disappointment.

Darcy leveled a look at her.

“Not even close.  But I need a break.  This is _hard_ ,” she complained.

“I thought you said you like a challenge,” Barton shot back.

Darcy switched her glare to him.

“I do, but this is ridiculous.  His firewalls’ _firewalls_ have firewalls, and redundancies, and....it’s just really complicated, okay?!”  She exclaimed, seeing their blank faces at her explanation.

“Well, some of us can’t just sit around in coffee shops all day,” Natasha said, standing up and putting away her tablet, “so I’ll see you back at the tower.  Remember -”

“Go back separately, don’t mention anything where JARVIS can hear.  I know, I know,” Darcy said, rolling her eyes.  “I’m surprised you guys managed to sit around this long, isn’t there some rule about that, like if you relax for ten minutes, you’re supposed to be summoned automa-”

She cut off when both Avengers’ phones immediately started beeping from where they’d been safely muffled in Natasha’s bag, where the microphones couldn’t let JARVIS pick up anything they said.

The speakers were louder than the muffling, and patrons of the coffee shop were starting to give them dirty looks.

“Okay, woah.  I didn’t cause that.  Did I cause that?  That totally wasn’t my fa-”

Natasha silenced her with a _look_ while Barton grabbed his phone.

“Yep, gotta run.  Keep us posted,’ Barton said over his shoulder as they rushed out of the shop.

“Hey, you forgot to pay!”  Darcy shouted after them, but they were already gone.

“Will you be paying with a card?”  The waitress asked, and Darcy groaned.

\---

The instant the quinjet touches down and the Avengers step out (now including Thor), Iron Man stops in his tracks.

“Oh, you’ve _got_ to be kidding me,” he said, and the other Avengers looked between him and their enemy for a moment, struck speechless.

“Uh, I think we’re missing something here?  Cause those look an awful lot like _you_ ,” Barton said.

Sure enough, their _enemy_ this time was an army of robots which looked an awful lot like slimmed-down versions of the Mark I Iron Man suit - the one Obie had stolen from him after he got back from Afghanistan.

“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, watching their movement for a moment before his brain kicked back into gear, and he launched himself into the air.

“ _Explanation_ , Iron Man?”  Steve said irritably into the coms.

“Someone got ahold of the plans for the first edition of the suit,” he said, grabbing one and punching his fist straight into the arc reactor in the center of its chest.

He’d made a lot of improvements to the strength of the suit since then, and since these were clearly unpiloted, he mercilessly ripped into as many as he could.

“I could use some help with your doppelgangers over here,” Barton shouted over the coms, and Tony spun around to see him running with four in pursuit.  He turned and fired an explosive arrow, taking out one and slowing down another as the destroyed one flew into it for a moment, but soon the three remaining were back on his tail.

Tony rocket back towards him, targeting two with his rockets and firing, distracting them long enough for him to grab them and fly off with them, leaving only one on Barton, who quickly dispatched it.

Tony released the two he was holding just long enough to plunge his metal fingers into the backs of their necks, ripping out enough wires to stop their functioning.

“Whoever built these didn’t do any better than Stane,” he muttered, and quickly had several voices in his ear demanding clarification.

Tony didn’t immediately reply, herding the Hulk towards the area with the most suits on the field, before turning into a vertical climb again, more than two dozen on his tail (they were clearly targeting him over the others).

“Obadiah Stane was Stark’s father’s business partner and friend, and ran SI after his death.  He was behind...Afghanistan,” Tony said, gritting his teeth, “and when Stark survived, he tried to steal the arc reactor technology.  He succeeded, and then salvaging the remnants of the destroyed Iron Man suit Stark made in the caves, he built...something a lot like these.”

There was silence on the coms for a minute, and Tony used it to confirm his theory that whoever had built these bots still hadn’t solved the icing problem.

Frozen suits fell back to earth around him as he reversed his dive and continued picking off as many suits as he could.

“Wait, that battle at SI, the one where you first appeared, that was -”  Barton began, but Tony cut him off.

“Ms. Potts found the suits Stane had built and he tried to kill her and the SHIELD agents she had with her.  I fought him, and stopped him.”

“And by stopped, you mean killed,” Natasha said, and although it wasn’t a question, Tony answered.

“Yes.”

There was another silence, punctuated only by the sound of exploding or smashing robots, and the occasional crack of thunder and lightning, courtesy of Thor.

(The Hulk was charging through them like toy soldiers, grabbing ones which tried to fly out of his way and smashing them into the ground.)

“I can’t believe Howard’s friend betrayed his son like that,” Steve finally said, and Tony gritted his teeth, holding his silence.

As far as the Avengers were concerned, it was Tony Stark with the grudge against his father, not Iron Man.

“Anyway,” he finally said, when he was sure his voice would sound steady through the filter, “whoever built these didn’t do much improving, they even still have the icing problem, that was one of the first things Stark fixed.”

The end of his sentence was punctuated by a large explosion from the building immediately to his left, and he spun out of control for a moment, belly-rolling in mid air.

“Iron Man, report!” Steve called in his ear.

“Damn, I take that back, the things just got smarter - they’re targeting the buildings!”

“The area isn’t clear!”  Steve shouted back, and his sensors told Tony that Steve had just run into the building.

JARVIS scanned it, and found that most of the people were either dead or fleeing, but there were two trapped on the top floor and two more halfway down the building.

He reported the location of the lower two to Steve and then flew to the two on the higher floor first, as they were easiest to get to, and once he’d set them down he flew back in.

He’d landed near Steve and was preparing to help him move the blockage between them and the civilians when his head went fuzzy.

_Oh no, not now_ , he thought, but he was escaping the caves in Afghanistan again, surrounded by fire, the suit damaged and overheating around him, and then the heat was growing and growing and it was hot, too hot, it was _burning_ -

"Iron Man? _Iron Man_!"

Tony snapped out of the flashback at the sound of Steve's voice.

"Yeah, Cap, sorry," he covered quickly.

"Keep your head focused," Steve said, frowning, then turned and pointed at a collapsed pillar.

Immediately the sensors in the suit told Tony that the pillar was holding much of the ceiling up, but it was also blocking access to the room with the two civilians in it, calling for help.

"I'll lift that up, and you get the civilians outside, okay?" Steve shouted over the sound of the fire.

Tony took one look around and knew the fire was spreading too quickly.

"No, I'll get it," Tony said, keeping the caves out of his mind by pure force of will, and a determination not to fail the team. "You get the people out."

"Iron Man -" Steve began, but Tony cut him off.

"Look, I’m not some spunky sidekick trying to prove himself.  The fire is spreading too quickly. I'll last longer staying in here, at least I've got a metal suit on. You don't, serum or not. So shut up and get ready, Winghead," Tony said, then moved into position while Steve was still staring at him, concerned.

Quickly Steve snapped out of it and stood near the doorway.

“Oh, and Iron Man?  I know you’re not a sidekick.”  He said, nodding at Tony, and Tony grabbed the pillar and lifted, using the thrusters in his suit with as little force as possible, so as not to bring down the building around them while lifting the weight.

“Well, good,” Tony said, keeping most of the strain from the weight out of his voice (and more was filtered out anyway).  “After all, the spunky sidekick always dies.”

He grunted under the weight as he felt minute shifts in the building put more strain on the pillar.

“Hey, JARVIS, make a note for Stark to add a better cooling system in here,” he said, aware his coms were still on.

“Of course,” JARVIS replied.

It only took Steve three minutes to get the two people, a woman and her son, safely outside.

It would take Iron Man another twelve seconds to safely lower the pillar and clear the building.

But the building only lasted four.

Once he let down the weight, the whole ceiling came down around him, other supports falling quickly enough to slam him down and through the floor as the structure crumbled.

One support slammed into the suit with enough force to dent it, then it ripped open when the entire floor fell through. This left part of Tony's left side and thigh exposed when he and the support plunged down to ground level, the fire still burning around him.

Most people who had a building fall on them probably would have _at least_ had the decency to fall unconscious, Tony thought.

Apparently he wasn't that lucky.

Tony didn't realize he was screaming until the voices in his ear made him realize he was screaming into the coms, and the Avengers could hear him.

He forced himself to stop, using a control born the first few months after Afghanistan, and quickly sucked in enough air to tell the Avengers he was pinned, before telling JARVIS to mute his mic.

Then he got back to screaming, while Steve and the others kept yelling for him to turn the mic back on.

Distantly, not through the coms, he could even hear the Hulk roaring, the sound getting closer.

_Oh good_ , he thought, his brain becoming sluggish, _backup_.

Then he passed out, hearing Steve still shouting over the coms.

“ _Iron Man_!”

“ _Iron Man, report_!”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so, so sorry. Feel free to yell at RogueWolf in the comments for the chapter title. Well, after you’re done killing me. XD
> 
> ...So is now a bad time to remind you I may or may not be able to update this weekend, but I should be fine for a week from now?
> 
> -dodges pitchforks-


	9. Third Degree

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again with the double meaning titles. Ahahahaha. ;P Although only one actually applies, again...This one was my fault, not RogueWolf's, though. XD
> 
> I have formally been apologizing to the Tony in my head for leaving him with a building on him for a week. And for leaving all of you with it, too.
> 
> There was actually less yelling in this chapter than I predicted. The characters do what they want, I swear...
> 
> (Alt chapter title: Partial Revelations)

_“-an!  Iron Man!  Report!”_

Tony jerked into consciousness suddenly, the echo of Steve’s voice still ringing in his ears.  The motion brought him into a halfway sitting up position before pain made him gasp and ease back down.

“Easy, easy,” the familiar voice said, and Tony whipped his head around to see Bruce walking towards him, hands raised slightly in a placating manner.

“You - what...How did I get here?”  Tony asked, and only then realized he was still wearing most of his armor, including the helmet.  He was in his workshop, but surrounded by equipment he'd bought for the hospital-wing floor, alone except for Bruce.

_Did they know?_

His right hand drifted up towards the helmet as if to make sure it was really there, unbidden.

Bruce’s eyes followed the motion.

“Ah, you were knocked out after the building fell on you, do you remember?”  He waited for a nod before continuing.  “The...Other Guy...and Thor dug you out.  We couldn’t tell if you were okay, aside from the obvious injuries, and as much as we respect your right to privacy, we couldn’t get ahold of Tony and we wanted to help…”  Bruce hesitated and drifted off.

Tony’s eyes narrowed behind the mask, but he noted how Bruce was still referring to him as a separate person from Iron Man.

“Did you take off the armor?”  He asked, stiffening.

“No.  JARVIS spoke to us through the speakers in your suit, refused to tell us how to take off the armor unless your life was in peril.  He monitored your vitals and only showed me how to remove or cut away the parts around your wounds.  Sorry about that, too, Tony will need to fix that.”  He gestured towards the cleanly-sliced edges of the suit around the gaps where he’d be hurt, and Tony let out his breath.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said, and then muting the speakers for a moment, repeated the thanks for JARVIS, saving his ass once again, and his identity.

“You’re welcome.  Please don’t make it a habit, I’ve got enough work with the others,” Bruce said.

“You’re most welcome, sir,” JARVIS replied at the same time, only audible instead the helmet.

Tony was starting to relax when he noticed Bruce was still looking nervous.

“Okay, what else happened?”  He asked, frowning.

“We...all the Avengers saw the wounds before I treated them,” Bruce said, slowly, and it took Tony a moment to realize what that meant.

“You saw the scars beneath them, didn’t you?  They all did?”  Tony asked, a coil of resigned dread running through him.

Bruce nodded, and the look on his face was one Tony couldn’t place.

“Those...I don’t know how you could have lived through that.  I’m not an idiot, I can tell from the severity that they’re over your whole body, aren’t they?” he said, and Tony tensed again, bracing himself for the pity.

“A token of Afghanistan, with Stark,” he bit out, and was relieved when Bruce didn’t ask, only nodded.

“But however you lived through them, that you still choose to _fight_ despite them...I…”  Bruce waved his hands, at a loss for words, and Tony headed him off.

“Look, if this is a ‘you shouldn’t fight in your condition’ talk, I don’t want to -”

“It isn’t!”  Bruce exclaimed, and Tony shut up in surprise at the vehemence in his tone.

“It isn’t,” he repeated, his tone softening again.  “Just that...I thought you were brave before, fighting with the Avengers when you didn’t have to.  That you do it while you must be in such... _pain_ , is even more…”  He waved his hands around again, looking for a word, and Tony turned away.

“I’m no hero, Doc, and I’d rather not hear it, but thanks.  Just don’t tell the others any more than they already saw, okay?  I don’t want them to know.”

Bruce stared at him.

“Why wouldn’t you tell them?  They won’t think less of you for it.”

“It makes me a liability.  They fought with me just fine before they knew anything, and knowing...it’ll change how they think of me.  They’ll hesitate before relying on Iron Man again.”

Bruce opened his mouth to argue again, and Tony waved him off.

“Look, you can disagree, just promise me you won’t tell them,” he said, stiffly.

Bruce watched him for a moment before nodding.

“I’m pretty sure this is covered under doctor-patient confidentiality, anyway...even if I keep telling you all I’m not that kind of doctor.”

Tony sighed in relief, a static burst through the helmet speakers.

“Thanks, Doc,” he said, before pushing himself into more of a seating position, ignoring Bruce’s irritated glance at the movement.

There was a moment of silence while Tony tried to feel out exactly how much pain he was in underneath the clearly heavy dose of painkillers he was on.

“There’s one more thing,” Bruce said quietly, and Tony turned to look at him again.

“What else?”

“We got ahold of Pepper and Colonel Rhodes, and they both turned up once or twice, but we couldn’t find Tony.  Pepper said she reached him, but since I was more suited to this than he was, she couldn’t call him back unless he was needed.”

Tony silently thanked whatever brought Pepper Potts into his life again.

“Then what’s the issue?”

Bruce looked awkward, and Tony had to stifle a laugh at his expression.

“Steve is...somewhat angry he didn’t come by anyway.  He was mad enough that JARVIS wouldn’t let anyone but me down here, anyway.”

Tony snorted.

“Stark wasn’t needed,” he said, thinking fast, “it’s better that he didn’t come.  I can talk to Steve.”  He sighed.  Yet another thing he would have to deal with.

Bruce was still looking at him pensively.

“I don’t blame him,” he murmured, and Tony twitched to look at him again while Bruce turned a slight shade of pink which suggested he hadn’t meant to speak aloud.

“Ah, I just realized, all the burn medications he and I have been working on, they were for you, weren’t they?  Healing both new burns and treatments for older burns as well.  He was trying to help how he could.”

Tony felt a stab of guilt over tricking Bruce into thinking Tony Stark was being that thoughtful - not that the medicines wouldn’t help other burn victims besides himself, but he knew well that it had been a selfish endeavor from the start.

“Ah, yes...and thanks for that.  We may have been...quietly testing some of them.”

Bruce frowned slightly at that, but couldn’t hide the hint of glee in his eyes.

“They do?  Which ones?  The more you can tell me the more I can improve on the -”

Iron Man sat with Bruce for quite a while, answering his questions, before they left the workshop again.

\---

It was not _too_ much later when JARVIS reminded Iron Man and Bruce that the other Avengers needed to be notified that their downed Avenger was okay, and Tony sent Bruce out of the room for a moment while he changed into an undamaged suit, hiding the well-wrapped wounds and easing the burn slightly as the air filters in the suit took away some of the sting on the wounds.

Then they both headed up the elevator to the common area where the others waited.

When they entered, the other Avengers rocketed to their feet from where they were scattered around the room.  Tony noticed Jane, Darcy and Thor were also still present, and made a mental note to see how Darcy had been doing with JARVIS later.

“Iron Man!”  Steve exclaimed, and strided towards them.  “You shouldn’t be up so soon!”

Tony sighed.  “I’m fine, Winghead.  How long was I out, anyway?”  He asked, turning back to Bruce.

“Almost four days,” Bruce replied, before sliding off to the side as the others crowded in.

“Wow, I guess I needed the sleep,” Tony joked, and earned a frown from Steve.

“You were _badly injured_ , Iron Man,” he argued.  “Those injuries would have kept _me_ down for a while.  And you were...:”

He trailed off, and Tony’s eyes narrowed behind the helmet.  He caught the look that flashed across all the Avengers’ faces.

“I was what?” He said, goading them.  “Already injured?  You didn’t know before and it was fine.  It isn’t more of an issue now than it was then.”

“Yes it is,” Steve bit out.

“Well, we know now,” Natasha said, just as cuttingly.

“You should not hide such wounds from your brothers-in-arms,” Thor added.

Tony glanced at Barton.

“You going to add your two cents, too?”  He asked, cuttingly.

Barton brushed off the jab with a shrug.

“Hey, the way I see it, I’m not really one to talk,” he said, hands raised in a “staying out of it” gesture.

“That’s right, you’re not,” Natasha muttered under her breath.

Tony gave Bruce a side-glance, and despite the helmet, Bruce obviously got the _I told you so_ loud and clear, as he winced slightly and looked away.

_This_ , the look said clearly, _this is why I didn’t want them to know._

“You could have _died_ , Iron Man,” Steve pushed again, and something in Tony snapped.

He was laughing humorously before he realized it, shocking the others into silence.

“Yes, _Captain_ , I could.  It’s a risk we all take.every time we go out.  You could have too, you probably _would_ have if I hadn’t stayed instead.  At least this way, it would have been damaged goods taking the fall!”

Steve looked like he had more to say, but the same look of shock was frozen on his face as on all the others’.

_“What?”_  Tony snapped.

“You’re not _damaged goods_ , Iron Man.  Is that...is that why you take the dangerous risks?  You figure if you die, at least you were already _damaged_?”

The anger in Steve’s voice had mostly been replaced by some sort of mix between horror and pity, and it made Tony _furious_.

“I _am_ damaged.  Now you know, hooray for you,” Tony said, and his cutting tone of voice translated well through the voice filter.  “But that doesn’t mean I can’t do my job.  I can still take all the hits now that I could before you knew.  But you can’t trust me anymore, can you?  You don’t trust me to have your back, now!   _This_ is why I didn't tell you!”

Steve stepped back like he’d slapped him, but Tony knew, with a rush of dread, that he was right.

He turned on his heel and strode out, ignoring the calls of the other Avengers and jumping into the open elevator shaft when JARVIS opened the doors, plummeting back towards the safety and seclusion of his workshop faster than the elevator could carry him.

All the while, strengthening the resolve behind his decision.

_They can never know who Iron Man is._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Bruce is a GOOD BRO.
> 
> Yeah, we're not near the ending yet. Tony's pissed, Steve's pissed (now both at Tony and Iron Man, separately), everyone else is some mix of pissed or worried...and Darcy's still been in the tower while Tony was out for four days. Don't think I forgot about that. Wheeeeeeeeeeee...fun times. >:D
> 
> No preview for you this time due to needing to build up my chapters buffer again (aka 10 is not done being written, sorry), but I'm pretty sure I should be able to have both the Sunday and Wednesday chapters as usual, even considering I owe my YODT fic readers an update too. At worst, just the Wednesday one again, but I think I can manage both.
> 
> Sorry you didn't get one last Sunday, I did actually finish my IRL stuff early enough, but I've been having an unresolved medical issue (I'm not dying, I swear, but cause as-of-yet unknown) which delayed me, since swallowing/breathing has been a little bit of a problem for the past couple weeks. Which bumped writing down my priority list just a little...But I'm breathing better at the moment, so I've been continuing to write. (Plus on top of that, I just got really sick last weekend which made sitting up not a thing that was going to happen, let alone writing, so, yeah. But I'm over that now, at least!)
> 
> Edit: Oops, caught a continuity error I just missed. It's tiny, I mistyped they were on the hospital wing floor but they're in the workshop. My bad!


	10. Breach

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some convenient-for-plot timing employed here. OH WELL IT WORKS. ;P
> 
> God I have SO MUCH LEFT FOR THIS STORY. I love writing these idiots.

When Tony returned to his workshop, he spent the first few hours making repairs to the damaged suit and undersuit, then beginning the assembly of a new backup suit, as his reserves were being blown through far faster than he’d predicted.

At one point, when he was wrist-deep in circuits and spare parts, JARVIS alerted him that Bruce was asking permission to enter the workshop to talk to Tony Stark.  (At some point, Pepper had alerted the Avengers to his return, covering for his inevitable reappearance.)

Tony was engrossed enough in the work that he didn’t even hear JARVIS, who politely turned Bruce away, saying as much.

The second time, sometime late into the night (or very early in the morning, depending on one’s point of view), when Bruce tried again, Tony had JARVIS turn him away again, but not unkindly.  He didn’t want to see anyone, particularly while he had to mask his new set of injuries from scrutiny.

When he’d completed the backup, the sun had already risen on the next day, not that he noticed.

Shortly after the ignored sunrise, however, JARVIS alerted Tony yet again to an Avenger’s request for entry, but this time it was Steve.

Tony felt far less guilty over refusing his request, after the warning Bruce had given him as to Steve’s anger with Tony Stark, and after his argument with Iron Man the previous day.

With the repairs and new suit finished, Tony set aside the various other projects he’d been working on for SI and the Avengers in favor of looking over Darcy’s hacking attempts over the last now-going-on-five days.

She’d been leaving the tower for most of each day, Natasha or Barton occasionally leaving a short time before or after her, but it wasn’t hard to track them to various coffee shops or libraries around the city.

She’d spent most of the first two days trying to drill into the main tower networks, and after the first day, JARVIS had started sending her false targets.  When she hit a particularly nasty one, the laptop she’d been using had been quite effectively bricked, with no way to restore it.

Tony took an extraordinary amount of glee from finding camera footage of her face afterwards.  He laughed until his side hurt, making the still-healing new injuries known.

Darcy hadn’t been deterred for long, however, and Tony suspected Natasha or Barton’s aid again, which JARVIS confirmed, alerting him that each spy had withdrawn enough cash from the accounts he’d given them to buy several laptops.  They certainly weren’t hiding what they were attempting, and he had to credit them for audacity, if nothing else.

She’d altered her focus then to his private server, and then for a few brief hours, JARVIS’ code directly.

Tony would have interfered personally then, had he been awake - he didn’t tolerate anyone targeting JARVIS - but JARVIS had handled it, bricking that laptop as well, accompanied by a rather _ingenious_ bit of code which shocked Darcy through the keyboard first, and put the words _“Nice try, Miss Lewis”_ on her laptop screen before it died.

She’d not gone after JARVIS’ code again.  (Tony felt a rush of pride for his little Skynet AI.)

JARVIS also admitted that the elevators may have somehow _misplaced_ Darcy’s entry code for the rest of the day, forcing her to take the stairs all the way back to the common floor.

On the final day, however, she’d changed tactics again, and it took Tony a few minutes to figure out her new target, as she seemed to have abandoned attempts on his servers entirely.

JARVIS had suspected she’d aimed for SI’s servers, but they also remained untouched.

Then Tony played a hunch, and - _aha_ \- found her accessing SHIELD’s servers, which JARVIS had more than a few fingers in.  (To the best of Tony’s knowledge, Fury still had no idea how far JARVIS had burrowed in, if he knew at all.)

They’d both been careful, and the occasional attempts SHIELD made every few months to hack JARVIS were met with more severe repulsions than Darcy’s, and at one point has caused an entire SHIELD station to go dark for more than two days, and for the following week, the only program that would run on and of the computers in the station was Galaga.

Darcy, however, seemed to have guessed they’d infiltrated SHIELD, and had been searching their servers for any information on Tony Stark, Iron Man, JARVIS, or any access points into their servers via SHIELD’s.

“Nice try,” he muttered to himself, following her progress, and then glanced up when an alert from JARVIS notified him that she’d just logged back into SHIELD’s servers, trying again.

He watched her progress, silently shadowing her hack, and was glad he’d already had JARVIS monitoring SHIELD for any information on him or Iron Man he didn’t want getting out, immediately wiping it from their servers.  She _was_ rather skilled.  Maybe he would have Pepper offer her an internship with SI.

Fury had mostly kept his promise to keep his secret off-book, however, and there hadn’t actually been much for JARVIS to delete.

Any information they left behind on Iron Man or Tony Stark were things he didn’t particularly mind them knowing, and much of it was general knowledge, in Tony Stark’s case.

He watched her progress for nearly an hour before he blinked and suddenly found himself looking at a tiny backdoor into his main servers.

“JARVIS, what did she just find?  That wasn’t a new tunnel.  How did she get in?”  He asked, sitting up suddenly, alarmed.

“I don’t know, sir.  The breach was hidden, my system failed to detect it.  Shall I eject her from the server now?”

If an electronic voice could sound concerned (and the Avengers could assure anyone it _could_ , from their time with Iron Man), JARVIS’ did.

“Yes, do it now!”  He exclaimed, frantically plugging the leak as JARVIS kicked Darcy from the server.

They spent the next half-hour patching over the code, and then when JARVIS alerted him to Darcy’s return to the tower (specifically, the Avengers’ common room), Tony left JARVIS scanning for any other breaches and trying to figure out exactly what the leak had accessed.

With no clues as to who had managed to _hack his server_ , Tony put on his undersuit and disguisers again, took another dose of painkillers, and left the workshop, heading up after her.

\---

Darcy hadn’t even managed to signal Natasha and Barton away from the others to report on the semi-successful hack when Tony barged out of the elevator for the first time (out of the suit) in nearly a week, and ignoring Steve’s startled demand to know where he’d been, he matched straight over to her and pointed a finger in her face, eyes narrowed.

“How did you find the hack?”  He demanded, and Darcy could see Natasha and Barton still, watching them, while the other Avengers looked varying levels of confused, annoyed, or (particularly in Steve’s case) somewhat angry.

“I don’t know,” she said, rushed, and more than a little freaked out by the look on her idol’s face.  “It was already there, I found it by accident, I just -”

“Hold on,” Steve said, reaching for Tony.

Tony quickly backed away to avoid him, which placed Steve slightly between Tony and Darcy.

“You owe us an explanation, Stark, and you don’t get to yell at our guests, even if you do own the building.”

Tony glared at Steve.

“I get to question anyone _hacking my servers_ ,” he bit back, and Steve glanced back at Darcy for a moment, who looked guilty.  “And you all had things handled, I can’t just run back here when I’m not needed.  This is not the only thing I do, _Rogers_.”

The information about the hacking seemed to have taken the wind out of his sails.

“You...what?”  He said, abruptly losing his righteous standing, looking over his shoulder at Darcy.

“ _Darcy_ ,” Jane said sternly, from where she’d been sitting with Thor on a couch, and Darcy winced.

“We asked her to,” Barton admitted, taking the resulting glare from Steve.

Tony rolled his eyes, still angry, but not actually at _Darcy_ as much as whoever had managed the hack.

“You, with me, _now_ ,” he said, pointing at Darcy again, and when Natasha and Barton looked ready to step in to defend her again, he sighed exasperatedly.

“I’m not going to _eat her_ ,” he exclaimed, anger burning out in favor of frustration.  “She has to show me exactly what she did, I don’t care about what you three schemed, you _still_ weren’t close.  But someone _else_ got in, and JARVIS is still looking over what they got access to.  So you two,” he said, pointing at Natasha and Barton, “come if you must, but _follow_ me, _now_ ,” he demanded, walking back towards his second elevator, Darcy trailing behind like a chastised puppy.

“Wait,” Steve said, catching on belatedly, anger momentarily turning to shock.  “Someone hacked JARVIS?”

From his seat at one of the couches further away, Bruce rose, his face concerned rather than angry, and Tony met his eye for a moment before looking back at Steve.

“Not JARVIS, the tower’s main servers, including the Avengers’ data.  I’ll let you know when we figure out exactly what they found.  Now you three, _move_.”

With Darcy, Natasha and Barton following him into the second elevator for the first time, the other Avengers stood or sat frozen in their wake for several moments after they were gone.

Bruce finally unfroze first.

“You shouldn’t have yelled at him,” he said quietly, eyeing Steve’s back, and Steve’s head snapped around to look at him.

“What?”  He asked, and a small amount of the anger he’d directed at Tony was still in his voice.

Bruce breathed once or twice to calm the small rumble of the Other Guy in his mind at the subtle threat in his tone before replying.

“At Tony.  I get why you’re angry, he didn’t come rushing to his friend’s side.  But he was right, he couldn’t have actually done anything, and although he funds all this,” he said, waving his hands around the room briefly, “and keeps building new things for us and for SHIELD, I think we sometimes forget he is not actually an Avenger.  I’ll keep saying it, I’m _not_ that kind of doctor, but I was keeping Pepper informed and JARVIS didn’t think Iron Man needed anyone else present.  So don’t yell at Tony for it.”

Steve, Thor, and Jane all stared at Bruce when he was done.  It was the most he’d said at one time for quiet a while, and he fidgeted for a few moments until he turned red under their gazes and quickly excused himself, not stopping when Steve called for him to wait, sounding reproached.

He was back on his floor when JARVIS quietly spoke up.

“Thank you for defending him, Doctor Banner.”

Bruce blinked, turning slightly pink again.

“Ah, I probably spoke out of turn, please don’t tell Tony.”

“I will not,” JARVIS reassured him, “but out of turn or not, you have my gratitude.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Argh chapter titles. This one, I'm okay with, the next one, I'm still working on. XD And to be clear, Bruce kinda yelling at Steve is not an insta-fix. He just snapped, and gave Steve the what-for I really wanted to give him myself.
> 
> Also, poll for you all related to me planning which fics I’ll write after this. Tony and Bucky are my shipping bicycles so I am a multishipper, and I have several fics next which could be any of several ships, and I need to plan them long ahead of when I’m actually done with this fic, so, yeah. I'm not wrapping up this one yet, I'm just planning ahead. Poll: http://www.poll-maker.com/poll342038xB2234Ff5-13  
> (To be clear, I’m a multishipper, and the vote won’t stop me from writing different ships, but I’m curious.)
> 
> (Or send me more fic ideas/prompts via Tumblr! @tiredtypingandtea)
> 
> And a preview, because I managed to write chapter 11!
> 
> Next Chapter:  
> “If you have time now, you could come down and help me with some modifications to the suit,” Tony offered, cutting him off again, and Bruce had to replay the sentence in his head before he realized what had just been offered.
> 
> Knowing that making a big deal out of the offer would only likely result in avoidance and possibly a withdrawal of said offer, he simply nodded.
> 
> “Yeah, I’d like that.”


	11. Inspection

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not so fond of this title but I was trying to be ambiguous. XP
> 
> I'm really glad I wrote this chapter at the same time as chapter 10 because I'm feeling lousy again, and I don't know what the heck is wrong with me (and neither does my doctor). UGH.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! EHEEHEEHEEHEEHEE!

Back in the workshop again, Tony walked in only to see Darcy, Barton and Natasha hanging back, staring around.

(There were partially-finished projects laying around, including an upgrade to Natasha’s Widow Bites and Barton’s bow, but the Iron Man suits had all been safely locked away before he had left the workshop.)

Mentally pinching himself, he remembered that none of the Avengers except Bruce have actually seen much of his workshop.  Every time he shows them a new weapon he’d made for them, he had brought them to the training floor, never the workshop.

He knew he wasn’t at risk of his secrets getting out by just having the two spies on the floor, but he wasn’t foolish enough to give them free run of the place, either.

“You two,” he said, pointing at each spy in turn, causing their gazes to snap back to him guiltily, “can sit and watch, but JARVIS will be monitoring you, and he has _explicit permission_ to use more force than necessary to stop you if you decide to start snooping.  Got it?”

Barton and Natasha glanced at each other, silently agreeing not to test JARVIS.  Darcy had told them about the bricked computers and the electric shock she’d received, strong enough to numb her fingers for a while.

They didn’t really want to learn what he’d do to two fully-trained spies, rather than a civilian hacker he didn’t see as a threat.

“We’ll behave,” Natasha assured him calmly, and he gave her a skeptical glance before pointing them towards a couch and directing his attention to Darcy.

The next several hours were spent going over the foreign code (which Tony separated from his servers so they could work on it without allowing Darcy access to the servers) and analyzing JARVIS’ findings as to the examined data.

Progress went far more slowly for Darcy than Tony, in part due to JARVIS having to heavily redact or outright deny permission to access any files Tony or the Avengers as a whole might not want her to see.

All the meanwhile, Natasha and Barton were discovering that babysitting two hackers while they were in the coding zone was far less interesting than they had thought.  Eventually Barton gave up, heading back upstairs to get yelled at my Steve for breaking House Rule One.  His passing went unnoticed by Tony and Darcy, only being marked by Natasha, the ever-present JARVIS, and the quirky robot arms which had been poking at them curiously since they arrived.

Natasha remained behind, keeping an eye on the hackers, and trying to gather as much information from her surroundings as she could.

It wasn’t much, but there were signs here and there of how Tony Stark had been, obviously, aware of Iron Man’s injuries, and she could see a more-than-basic med kit against one wall, similar to one she had on her floor as well, for injuries she could treat herself.

It was clear the pair of them knew how to deal with their situation, at least in general.

Watching Tony work, fully dedicated on the task at hand, cemented the realization for her that he wasn’t as carefree as he often seemed.  It was a mask, just like many she wore herself.

He had Iron Man handled, with the same attention he paid their weapon and armor upgrades.

That realization allowed her to forgive the secrets they withheld, and while she had no plans to stop investigating those secrets, she didn’t take the same offense Steve did to their existence.

(Being fair, she knew, it would also be rather hypocritical of her if she _did_ hold it against him, as she had plenty of secrets of her own, which Tony seemed to be willing to not pursue.)

After her decision to forgive and trust both of them again, she slipped out after Barton, leaving the workshop to the two nerds.

\---

Not long after Natasha’s emergence and subsequent turn to be yelled at by Steve, Darcy was ejected from the workshop, the remaining tasks only able to be done by Tony and JARVIS.

Steve and Jane both took their turns yelling at her while Barton passed her a heaping mug of coffee, earning a grateful glance before she dropped her head on her arms, exhausted.

“Look, can you two yell some more later, I’ve got a headache, I don’t know how he manages to work so long in one go.  I need _sleep_ ,” she groaned, drawing out the last word as she took her mug and, setting it down on a coffee table, flopped gracelessly onto one of the empty couches.

Bruce watched from in the kitchen, a smile pulling up his lips slightly.

“There aren’t many people who can keep up with him for long,” he remarked.  “You lasted longer than I thought you would.”

“Ugh, screw you, Green Bean, I’m dead,” she mumbled into the couch cushions.

That earned her a real smile and a surprised laugh from him.

“You _have_ been around Tony too long.”

Ignoring Darcy’s grumbled retort, he turned back to cooking, while Steve and the others settled back into their various tasks, Steve muttering about how he wasn’t finished with her.

Bruce had been avoiding the others for a little while after his outburst, but it was his turn to cook, and he knew it was unlikely Tony or Iron Man were going to join them, so he’d resolved to take them both food.

Tony beat him to it, however, when he reappeared, looking exhausted, before Bruce had finished setting out food for the others.

“You’re done?”  He asked, and the others all turned to see as he walked further into the room, looking rather bleary-eyed, making a beeline for the bottles of alcohol in the corner.

Once there, he hovered over a few bottles before picking one out, sighing once as he poured the drink and stoppered it again, then turned around to look at the many faces eyeing him.

“JARVIS and I plugged the hack, and with the young Padawan’s assistance over there,” Darcy responded by giving a tired fist pump into the air from her position on the couch, “we found how they entered via SHIELD’s systems.”

“What were they after?”  Barton asked in the resulting moment of silence, when it became clear Steve was hesitating to ask.

“We’re still not sure exactly what they looked at, but the main things seem to have been the Avengers’ reports, a few SI files on the server I’d been looking at, and your coms,” Tony replied, taking a drink.

“The coms?  They were listening in?”  Steve finally exclaimed.

Tony nodded, frowning.

“I don’t think they could have heard anything crucial, so it’s not clear who they are or why they put out so much effort, but JARVIS and I won’t let them try again.”

He sounded, and was, confident that they could prevent another intrusion, now that they found the exploit the hacker had used.  The vulnerability had been more in SHIELD’s servers than his own, and he’d alerted Fury to the hack, keeping an eye on the resulting patches, which were inelegant but did the job.

Seeing his eyelids droop, Bruce intervened, halting any more questioning, by shoving food at Tony and the others, motioning for Tony to take a seat next to him as they ate.

He dropped into the seat without protest, too worn out from the panicked burst of work to argue.

Not paying attention, however, he hissed slightly under his breath when the careless slump into the chair made the injuries on his side known, and he was quick to busy himself with eating when Bruce gave him a side glance.

Dinner was somewhat awkward since Tony, who (when he was present) was usually the main source of conversation, wasn’t talking, but eventually Barton cracked a few jokes with Darcy, breaking the ice, and after Jane and Thor joined in, the other Avengers settled back into a more normal atmosphere.

Only Bruce noticed the glances Steve occasionally threw Tony, who was determinedly avoiding everyone’s gazes, staring down into his plate as he ate, his thoughts clearly elsewhere.

When he pushed back his chair to leave, Bruce followed him into the kitchen as he cleared his plate, catching him before he could sneak away.

He’d intended to gently check in on him and Iron Man, but when Tony turned and spotted him, he cut him off.

“I’m sorry I avoided you before.  It wasn’t personal,” he said awkwardly, and Bruce blinked, having to think back to JARVIS’ denials of entry to the workshop before he knew what Tony was talking about.

“I understand,” he reassured him.  “I didn’t take it as an insult.  I just wanted to ask -”

“If you have time now, you could come down and help me with some modifications to the suit,” Tony offered, cutting him off again, and Bruce had to replay the sentence in his head before he realized what had just been offered.

Knowing that making a big deal out of the offer would only likely result in avoidance and possibly a withdrawal of said offer, he simply nodded.

“Yeah, I’d like that.”

And so, when Tony left the common floor, Bruce followed him down to the workshop again, Tony babbling the whole way about ideas for medical improvements to the suit, now that Bruce knew about Iron Man’s burns.

Neither scientist noticed the way Steve watched them leave.

\---

Bruce soon learned exactly how easy it was to fall into the zone around Tony, and they both were working for _hours_ before he began to notice how much time was passing.

Prompting JARVIS for the time, he was surprised to realize they’d been shut away for more than eight hours, working through the night.

Knowing Tony hadn’t slept the previous night either, Bruce had to wonder how exactly the other man kept running for so long, although from the large pile of used coffee grounds in the trashcan in the corner, he suspected they both had been running on nothing but caffeine for quite a while.

“Tony,” he said, trying to break into the monologue Tony had going and failing, he sidestepped to avoid a screwdriver being flailed about in mid-air by his friend.

The corner of his mouth tugged into a smile again as he rolled his eyes at the back of Tony’s head.

Next to him, Dummy made a chirping noise and rotated its arm like humans would tilt their heads.

Bruce patted the thing on its claw absent-mindedly, the motion already becoming a habit.

He watched Tony for a few moments more, unable to break into his concentration, trying to remember exactly what they’d been doing.

Something about making changes to both the painkillers Iron Man was taking, and how the suit helped him with injuries, old and new.

He was dwelling on those thoughts when You rolled over to Tony and bumped into his side while trying to pass him a wrench he wanted, but instead of just shoving the bot away like he’d told Bruce to do, he made a pained noise, holding his side for a moment before turning back to his work while the bot slunk away with its head down.

He’d forgotten Bruce was in the room, and the careless reaction was what clicked it for Bruce.

The flinches, which Bruce had long since catalogued as PTSD (most likely from his capture in Afghanistan, he’d thought _with_ Iron Man), the injuries in _the same places as Iron Man_ (a connection none of the Avengers had made yet due to his avoidance of being touched), which he kept trying to pass off as ‘workshop-related shenanigans,’ and how he’d disappeared when Iron Man was injured - they all made sense.

Even the refusal to being touched made sense, not as PTSD like everyone had thought, but as a result of the _burns_ , if he was right.

_Tony Stark was Iron Man_.

He wondered how he’d been so _blind_.

Oblivious to Bruce’s eureka moment behind him, Tony kept working until Bruce pulled himself together.

“Hey, Tony.  Tony.   _Tony_ ,” Bruce called, only his third and slightly louder attempt getting through Tony’s thoughts.

“What?  Oh, hey, Bruce, what are you doing h- oh, right, we were working on the suit.”  He looked down for a moment, and made a face when he couldn’t remember what he’d been doing with the wrench in his hand.

“Right, uh, did you need something?”

Bruce suppressed a smile.

“Tony, I know what’s been going on with you.”

At the _briefest_ look of panic that flittered across his face, Bruce was pulled up short.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Tony said, pulling his face into a look of blank confusion.

“You...have PTSD,” Bruce said, hating himself slightly but changing his sentence in a flash decision, “don’t you?”

Tony was frozen for a second, but couldn’t hide the way tension bled out from his posture.

“What?  I, uh...right, I...do have that.  I don’t like talking about it.”

Bruce sighed, unsurprised at the reaction.

“I know, and I won’t force you to, just know I’m around to talk to if you need it, okay?”

Tony nodded, blinking rapidly a few times before turning back to his work.

Bruce rolled his eyes, and breaking the tension, pulled the wrench away and without touching him, herded Tony out of the workshop in order to hunt down food upstairs.

He didn’t bring up the PTSD or his realization again until he was alone on his floor.

“JARVIS?” He said quietly.

“Yes, Doctor Banner, how may I help you?”

“I know you can’t confirm if I’m right, and don’t tell him I know, but I _do_ know.”

“Know what, Doctor?”  JARVIS asked, even though Bruce suspected he knew.

“Tony is Iron Man.”

JARVIS was quiet for a moment, which was, Bruce knew, the best confirmation he was likely to get.

“I cannot speak of the identity of the Avenger known as Iron Man,” he said, eventually.

“I know,” Bruce replied, “and I’m not asking you to.  I just want _you_ to know that I know.”

JARVIS was quiet again.

“Your remarks have been noted.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BRUCE KNOWS! He knooooooows! -does a gleeful dance-
> 
> That doesn’t mean the others are going to learn any time soon! Bruce is just the most observant, and the one closest to Tony out of the suit, so he’d be most likely to be able to figure it out. Science Bros for the win. :D And we still have other problems to deal with! I've been dying to write and share this one for soooo long.
> 
> Due to getting sick again (UGH, SERIOUSLY THIS STINKS) I don't have a buffer again so no preview. :( (I should have time to write before the Saturday night/Sunday update though so there should still be that update unless I get even more sick.)
> 
> (Also confession, I was tired when I replied to the first comment on the last chapter and I VERY NEARLY forgot which chapter I'd just posted and almost spoiled this one. I only caught it at the last moment. DX)
> 
> Shipping poll from last update again, in case you didn't vote: http://www.poll-maker.com/poll342038xB2234Ff5-13
> 
> And although it will make this yet another really long end note, I just want to thank you all so much for all the kudos and comments and bookmarks. I really do notice when people kudos multiple fics of mine too, when I get the "you have kudos" emails, and I recognize when the same people keep commenting on multiple chapters. You guys make my day every time, particularly lately with the really lousy health issues I've been having. Thank you so much!


	12. Upgrades and Downtime

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here I get to be obscure...welp. It’ll be clear later! Poor JARVIS…
> 
> It’s another mostly goofy but not unimportant chapter! (Enjoy it, the funny parts are going to give way to Big Plot Things for most of the rest of the story!)

After Bruce left, Tony buried himself in finishing various projects for the Avengers, including upgrades to Natasha’s Widow Bites, sleeping gas arrows for Barton (and if he misused them, Tony was going to set the Hulk on him), and a new earpiece and microphone he’d developed for Thor which would hopefully be resistant to his lighting.

After which, he had JARVIS pull up any news or camera footage from the Avengers’ recent battles, and began working on more tech to help anywhere he saw weaknesses.

At one point, when Tony was deep in an engineering coma, JARVIS broke in.

“Sir, I really don’t think that is a good idea.”

Tony brushed it off, still in the zone.

“Nonsense, J, Contrary to popular opinion, I know what I’m doing.”

JARVIS didn’t reply again, but Tony knew he disapproved anyway.

His latest project immediately was added to the Do Not Mention list, which JARVIS clearly was displeased over as well.

“Sir, may I at least insist you take precautions and -”

“Yes, yes,” Tony replied, cutting him off.  “I know what you are going to say, and you know what to do, start synthesizing it.”

“Thank you, sir,” JARVIS said, and Tony dropped back into the zone again.

JARVIS watched and assisted as needed, and if he could sigh, he would have.

Instead, he made a call.

\---

Tony was still deep in his engineering coma when there was a knock on the door some time later.

He glanced up quickly at the blacked-out glass door, confused.

“J?  No one is supposed to be down here.  Did I miss something?”

“No, sir, it is Colonel Rhodes here to see you, sir,” JARVIS replied.

Tony narrowed his eyes slightly at the nearest of JARVIS’ cameras, in the projector for one of his holo screens.

He stared for a moment, suspicious, then went to let Rhodey in.

“Hey, buddy, I didn’t expect to see you here.  What’s up?”

Rhodey didn’t look particularly amused.

“What are you doing that JARVIS can’t tell me about?  Last time he called me, you’d just invited a bunch of spies and superheroes into your house.  What _now_?”

Tony glared at JARVIS’ camera again.

“Traitor,” he grumbled.

“Sorry, sir,” JARVIS said, not sounding sorry in the slightest.

“Tony?”  Rhodey prompted again.

Tony threw his arms up in a dramatic shrug.

“Clearly he’s malfunctioning, I’m not doing anything unreasonable,” he insisted.

Rhodey’s face said he wasn’t buying it.

“Yeah, try again, Tony.”

Tony groaned.

“Fine, look, nothing bad is going to happen,” he began, and Rhodey looked pained.  “No, _really_ ,” Tony insisted.  “I was going to tell you about it eventually, anyway.  See, this is what happened…”

\---

All the Avengers saw was Colonel Rhodes arriving in the elevator, and after politely greeting them with the slightly pained expression they’d all begun to associate with him and Pepper when Tony had done something, he vanished into the second elevator, going down to the workshop.

“What’s he done now?”  Steve asked, a similarly pained expression crossing his face before it settled into a slightly pinched worry.

“Oooh, ten bucks he blew something up,” Barton offered, unhelpfully.

Natasha glanced over at him.

“Ten says he comes back looking more concerned than he was just now.”

Barton rolled his eyes.

“That’s a sucker’s bet, I’m not taking that.”

Jane and Bruce ignored them, continuing their game of poker with a still-learning Thor, but Darcy peered over her cards at them.

“I’ll put ten down that he’ll come back _without_ any explosive burns, but he’ll immediately head for the drinks,” she offered.

Barton grinned over at her.

“Deal,” he said.

When Rhodey emerged around two hours later, Barton, Natasha, and Darcy watched as he walked out of the elevator, not even acknowledging any of them beyond a tired nod, and headed straight for the alcohol, pouring himself a large portion of one of the better brandies.

He didn’t have any signs of explosives on him, but he did look stressed and exhausted.

Barton silently handed Darcy ten dollars while Natasha smiled slightly.

Rhodey downed the drink quickly, and excused himself, apologizing that he couldn’t stay.

After he was gone, the Avengers exchanged looks.

“Now I _really_ want to know what he’s done,” Darcy said, and Barton nodded in agreement.

Bruce frowned thoughtfully, somewhat worried.

Barton and Darcy’s muttered guesses were interrupted, however, by Iron Man exiting the second elevator, and a somewhat awkward silence descended.

Bruce found himself examining him more closely for any familiar signs of Tony, but with the suit acting as both a literal and a figurative armor, there really was no sign to see.

The atmosphere grew slightly tenser when Steve finally rose and walked over to Iron Man, who seemed to unconsciously straighten, as if preparing to be shouted at.

Instead, Steve paused a little in front of him, frowning but looking somewhat uncomfortable.

He extended his hand, and Bruce could swear he spotted the tiniest flinch before Iron Man took it carefully.

They shook hands, and the tenseness broke.

“Sorry,” Steve muttered quietly.  “I don’t agree that you hid your injuries from us, but I do trust you.  We all trust you.”

Iron Man tilted his head slightly.

“I guess that will be tested the next time we are in the field,” he said, and Steve swallowed and nodded in acknowledgement before returning back to his spot on one of the couches.

Bruce let out a breath, and thought he saw Iron Man’s head rotate slightly to look at him.  He smiled back in case he was right, and then turned back to Jane, who was sitting next to him, and returned to their interrupted conversation on recent experiments Jane had been performing in London.

Iron Man stole the remote from Barton and dropped onto one of the empty seats, flicking through the channels until he found a movie channel.

The rest of the evening was spent with Barton and Iron Man fighting over the remote, and when they finally decided to have a movie night, they sniped popcorn kernels at each other over Steve and Natasha’s heads until Natasha upturned the bowl over Barton’s head.

\---

The next week passed with Iron Man spending far more time around the tower than Tony Stark, although Tony did call Natasha and Barton down to the training rooms in order to give them their new weapon upgrades.

When Barton was handed the new sleeper arrows, an unholy grin crossed his face, which was not lost on either Tony or Natasha.

“If you use those on me or any of the Avengers,” Tony cautioned him, “I will replace all your exploding arrows with glitter bombs, and I will stick JARVIS on you.”

Natasha nodded in approval.

“I’ll help,” she said simply.

Barton paled slightly.

“Okay, okay, I won’t do anything!”  He exclaimed, hands raised in surrender.

“You’d better not,” Tony mumbled, before turning to Natasha and making a few adjustments to her gear.

When he left again, he warned the Avengers he’d be gone on SI business again for a few days, and we would be taking Iron Man with him until he returned.

He wasn’t lying, and the tower seemed somehow emptier for the next several days, while they were gone helping Pepper and the SI tech department.

While he was gone, Pepper called via JARVIS and summoned Jane and Darcy away as well, confusing the Avengers.

When they returned, Jane and Darcy were accompanied by Pepper, who explained Tony and Iron Man were returning separately to the workshop and would be back later.

Once Pepper left, Thor asked Jane why she’d been called away.

Jane and Darcy both looked excited.

“We were hired by Stark Industries,” Darcy exclaimed, and all the Avengers looked surprised.

“What about London?”  Bruce asked, looking to Jane.

“I’ll stay there for now,” she replied, “but my grant is running out at the end of the year, and Sta-...and Tony and Pepper offered me a far better deal than I have now.”

“They offered me a paid internship too,” Darcy said, practically bouncing.  “I got to see some of their new prototypes, and Mr. Stark said he’ll send me one of the new StarkPhones to beta, and I can help with the software updates before they go live.”

Steve blinked.

“That...sounds like a great offer,” he said, clearly not understanding some of what she said.

Barton grinned and clapped Darcy on the shoulder.

“I guess we’ll be keeping you around!”

She laughed.

“You can’t get rid of me that easily.  I still want to talk more with JARVIS!”

Natasha smirked while Barton rolled his eyes.

“I see, you’re not staying for _us_ , just the robot butler in the ceiling.  I know how it is!”

“Pleasure to continue having you around, Miss Lewis,” JARVIS injected, surprising them all slightly, and making Darcy grin.

“No hard feelings, then?”  She asked.

“I do not hold your attempts against you,” JARVIS replied calmly, “as you would not have broken through my firewalls without assistance.”

“Ooooooh, _buuuurn_ ,” Barton said, and Darcy smacked him back on the arm, which quickly degenerated into a pillow fight with the couch cushions.

As the two of them were joined by the rest of the Avengers, Bruce backed out of the line of fire, followed by Jane, who was laughing while she watched Thor hurl a cushion directly into Steve’s face, causing Darcy to laugh hard enough that she wasn’t paying attention to her feet and she tripped over Mjolnir on the ground.

Bruce sighed, but he was smiling.

“Aren’t you glad you decided to leave London for this more mature atmosphere?”  He asked.

She grinned back at him.

“It certainly is never boring here!”

Bruce’s reply was interrupted by a cushion to the face, and the room went silent as everyone stared in shock.

The pillow fell and Bruce blinked his eyes open again.

“Okay, who did it?”

Everyone exchanged looks until Darcy slowly raised her hand with a terrified expression on her face.

Bruce leveled a glare at her, and she swallowed nervously.  Then he turned to Jane and handed her the cushion.

“Avenge me?”

She grinned and hurled the cushion directly back into Darcy’s face.

When Tony returned downstairs, he forwent joining them in favor of kicking back and watching the mini-war erupting in his living room, ordering JARVIS to save a copy of the camera footage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh my god, I’ve just finished building a more detailed skeleton for the entire rest of the fic. XD At a rough estimate, there will be a total of roughly 20 chapters, depending on exactly where I put the chapter splits. (AHHHH I JUST REALIZED I’M MORE THAN HALF DONE BY THAT ESTIMATE, THEN.) And I think several of those should be longer than my norm so far! It's hard to tell with battle scenes, since I can't break them up at all.
> 
> I'm in the middle of writing the next chapter now, so no preview, sorry. I'm going to be busy this week, but because I know that now, I'm trying to write the next chapter or two now, so I shouldn't have to delay updates. The more detailed skeleton is helping a lot!
> 
> Edit:  
> Just a note, the Wednesday update this week may be posted a few hours later than normal (usually I do it Tuesday evening) because I need the extra time to finish up the next chapter. But I shall do it!


	13. Take Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I...am a horrible person. And I just noticed this is lucky number 13. >:D
> 
> Also, this is twice as long as some other chapters! I told you they were going to get longer!
> 
> Please forgive (and point out, if you wish) any spelling/word mistakes, I'm running on five hours of sleep for the past two days (total).
> 
> Also, oh my god, over 10k hits! Thank you, guys!

Tony woke to the sound of the Avengers’ alarm blaring, and he jerked into consciousness in a panic.

“J, what’s happening?”  He asked, frantically swapping his general-use undersuit with the one he wore in the Iron Man armor, taking his morning dose of painkillers and starting the assembly of the armor around him.

Dummy and You were frantically rolling around as they usually did when the alarm was going off, bumping into the tables and each other, making distressed beeping noises.

“Director Fury has reported the modified Mark I suits attacking one of the New York SHIELD facilities,” JARVIS reported with his typical calm.

Tony frowned as the faceplate slammed down and the HUD lit up.

“We need to find this guy,” he muttered, then as Dummy rolled up to him, he patted the extended claw before flying out the elevator shaft again.

Iron Man was only the second Avenger to reach the top floor with the quinjet Tony had designed, beaten by Bruce, who had the least preparation to do.

Bruce smiled in greeting, but stayed off to the side of the hanger, looking tired but preparing himself for the upcoming fight.

Tony and the other Avengers had learned early on that Bruce needed to be alone before and after each fight, and so he stayed away, waiting for the others.

Natasha, Barton, and Steve all arrived in the elevator together.  Natasha didn’t look like she’s just been woken up, but Barton had stubble on his face and was still pulling on his archery gloves, and Steve had similar stubble and bed-hair, Tony noted, and grinned behind his mask.  It was funny to see the man, usually so controlled, looking ruffled.

It worked on him, Tony thought, and then gave himself a mental slap.

“Is everyone ready?”  Steve asked, and Tony was about to reply when JARVIS interrupted.

“Sirs, there is a second call for the Avengers,” he said, and the other Avengers looked up at the ceiling in surprise.

“Where, JARVIS?”  Steve asked.

“Stark Industries,” JARVIS replied, and Tony paled behind the mask, not even noticing as the other Avengers all glanced at him.

“I have Pepper on the line for you, Iron Man,” JARVIS continued.

“I’ll handle SI,” he said to Steve quickly.  “You all can head to SHIELD as planned.”

He was about to power up his repulsors when Steve reached out and grabbed one of his gauntlets.

“Not so fast, you’re not going alone.  Natasha, Barton, Thor, you three help SHIELD, Iron Man, and I will take the Hulk and head to SI.”

Bruce nodded, knowing Iron Man was the only Avenger who could aim the Other Guy.

Tony wasn’t pleased.

He was about to argue when Steve turned and fixed him with a _look_.

While Natasha, Barton, and Thor walked into the quinjet, Steve walked up to the suit and spoke quietly so only he could hear.

“Don’t argue,” he said, and the low volume of his voice didn’t undermine the authority in it, “Bruce is better in open spaces anyway and doesn’t trust SHIELD.”

“And you?”  Tony asked, still frowning but resigned.

“I’m not letting any Avenger fight alone - and _don’t_ say you have the Hulk, you know as well as I do that he is not ideal backup.”

Tony sighed, shook his head, and gave a half-hearted salute.

“Well, you’ll get your chance to see if you can trust me again, won’t you?  I’ll meet you there,” he said, then powered up his repulsors and rocketed off the tower, leaving Steve and Bruce to drive over on their own.

Tony blasted towards SI as fast as he could, and when he braked over the top of the building, he could see the stolen suit designs swarming around it, crashing through the windows haphazardly and destroying as much of the building as possible.

They were not targeting any of the neighboring buildings, although occasionally one would shoot out of a wall and not be able to brake soon enough, smashing through the adjacent windows before turning back to continue the destruction.

JARVIS indicated that Pepper was calling, and Tony took the call as he flew at the nearest suits, smashing his gauntlets through their chest plates and into the arc reactors, and whatever material they were made of crushed with not too much difficulty beneath his stronger and more reinforced suit.

“Pepper, are you safe?”  He asked as soon as the call connected.

“I am,” she said, and although she sounded nervous and somewhat winded, she didn’t sound like she was in any pain.  “Is this about the Avengers?”

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly, as he ripped out two more suits’  reactors, crushing them in his fists.  “But whoever did this is probably the same guy who hacked the Avengers’ server, and there’s currently more suits attacking SHIELD, so it seems likely.”

“Wait, did you just say someone hacked -”

Suddenly other voices covered Pepper’s, and Tony muted his Avengers’ com line for a moment.

“Sorry, Pep, Avengers on the other line, I’ll tell you about it later.  Just stay safe!”

“Wait, don’t you dare -”

JARVIS ended the call, and Tony winced.  He was going to hear about that later.

Before unmuting the Avengers, JARVIS caught Tony up on what he’d missed - Natasha, Barton, and Thor were arriving at SHIELD, and were engaging the suits, but they weren’t being nearly as destructive as the suits at SI.

And Steve and Bruce had just arrived below him.

Tony dove down and rocketed just over their heads, catching a glimpse of Bruce just before he started morphing into the Hulk.

Doing so seemed to catch the attention of the suits, however, and suddenly the majority of them changed direction and began to follow him.  Others veered in front of him, which he had to dodge, often causing the avoided suit to crash into one of the pursuers, destroying both.

“Iron Man!”  Steve called over the coms.

“I’m a little busy, Cap!”  He shouted back, hard-pressed to avoid the sudden bombardment.

Somewhere below and behind him, the Hulk roared, and JARVIS informed Tony than he had begun picking the suits out of the sky and crushing them like toy soldiers.  He was staying on target, for the moment at least.

“Let’s not jinx that,” he muttered, and then had to make a sharp turn around a building to avoid another incoming suit.  This one took out three others when they all collided, unable to move as swiftly without anyone inside.

“Most of the suits are targeting Iron Man!”

Tony was going to reply that he was _well aware_ of this fact until he realized Steve was talking to the others at SHIELD.

“Ours just took off,” Barton called back, sounding a little out of breath.  “They’re headed back your way!”

“A diversion,” Natasha guessed grimly, and if she was winded, her voice didn’t show it.

“Check in with Fury, and if he doesn’t need you, we could use you here,” Steve ordered, and the others barked confirmations and dropped off the coms.

“Iron Man, how are you doing?”

Tony took another sharp corner and shaved off another couple suits, but there were still more than thirty on his tail.

“Just _peachy_ ,” he bit out as he twisted sharply downward, gaining only a small lead on the suits with the steep dive.

“Head back towards us, the Hulk has taken out most of the ones here.”

Tony changed direction sharply again, but he wasn’t heading towards SI.

“Can’t, the area still isn’t completely clear.  Besides, Stark and Pepper would kill me if I let these guys destroy more of SI property.”

“What exactly do you suggest, then?”  Steve asked, and Tony could clearly hear the frustration.

“JARVIS?”  Tony asked.

“Building in construction, forty meters ahead on your right,” he replied quickly.

“You know the construction on -” Tony began, to Steve.

“I heard him,” Steve cut him off.  “We’ll meet you there.  Hulk seems to be willing to follow the sounds of destruction you’re causing.”

“Good rage monster,” Tony said, the corner of his mouth twitching upwards for a moment, before he had to dodge one of the suits again.

He came into view of the building, and was relieved to see the surrounding area was nearly empty, blocked off due to the construction.

No civilian casualties here.

Tony dove into the metal framework of the building, and the suits followed, many quickly being destroyed when they couldn’t dodge the beams fast enough, or when they slammed into each other in the tight spaces.

When two immediately behind him collided, Tony was blown forward and off course, and slammed into one of the beams, hard, before righting himself.

He groaned.

“Oh, that’s going to leave a mark in the morning,” he said, wincing, but he couldn’t stop.

“We’re here!” Steve called, and when Tony emerged from the other side of the building with more than half the suits still following, he could see Steve and the Hulk, who had one suit crushed in one hand, and was glaring at the suits following Tony as if he could launch up and pull them out of the sky.

Which he then proceeded to follow through on, scaling the metal beams and leaping into the crowd of suits still on Tony’s tail, several crashing down beneath his weight or his fists.

“Thanks for the assist,” Tony called back, also projecting the noise through his suit’s external speakers, and the Hulk grinned fiercely before proceeding to continue smashing any suits that were in his range.

Tony lost track of Steve below him until the shield flew right by him, and he banked to dodge it so it flew into one of the pursuers instead before ricocheting back to its owner.

“You know that’s a shield, not a boomerang, right?”  Tony joked as he rocketed by, and he caught the flash of a smile on Steve’s face beneath the cowl.

“Don’t tell it that,” he replied, flinging it at another suit, sending it careening into another, the shield wedge in its side, and Steve flung himself after it, pulling it out and hitching a ride back down on another suit before smashing the shield through it and jumping back onto the in-construction building.

They were down to around half a dozen when Tony, flying through the building’s beams again at high speed, was rammed from behind by one of the suits which had broken off and predicted his flight path.  He crashed into several of the beams again and fell a few stories before catching himself again, groaning.

His suit was still in once piece, but he felt bruised everywhere, and he felt slightly off-balance.   _Probable concussion_ , he added to his mental list.

_Lovely_.

He was telling Steve to stop yelling in his ear about whether he was okay or not when he glimpsed three of the suits peeling off in a new direction, towards the lower section of the building.

Cursing everything, he dove after them with a bad feeling in his chest, and - yes.

Sure enough, Steve was in the building, having followed Iron Man, and the three were headed straight for him.

He held up his shield, but Tony didn’t really want to see what would happen if one of the suits purposefully blew next to him, serum or not.

“This is going to hurt,” Tony warned over the coms blasting ahead of the three incoming suits, and Steve had barely started to reply when Tony barreled into him, holding on and pulling him out of the way as one of the three flew into one of the nearby beams.

The blast wouldn’t have caused much damage, except the suits pursuing Tony seemed to be on the same page, and some had peeled around ahead of them.

All heading for the beams.

“Oh not again,” Tony groaned, altering his direction but slowed by the supersoldier he was holding, as the supports blew and half the building crumbled around them.

_Again_.

But this time, Tony didn’t lose consciousness.

He made it to the empty elevator shaft in the center of the building moments before the collapse, and the partially-completed cement walls around the shaft hold back enough of the beams that while they are trapped inside, they are not buried in the metal.

Tony heard the Hulk roaring somewhere above them, slightly muffled.

Steve, next to him, groaned, holding his ribs.

“Okay,” he said, coughing slightly, “that did hurt.”

Tony snorted once in laughter before the coms flickered on again.

“We just arrived in time to see that.   _What the hell do you have against buildings, Iron Man?_ ”

Tony groaned, one of his gauntlets coming up to rub against his faceplate.

“Nothing, Barton, they seem to have something against _me_.”

“Sure, blame the inanimate object.”  Barton shot back, and Tony could hear the grin in his voice, likely relieved Iron Man wasn’t reporting any injuries.

“Why do you assume it was automatically _my_ fault?  The suits brought it down, both times!”

“We’re fine by the way, thanks for asking,” Steve interjected, voice slightly strained but still amused.  “Care to help get us out?”

“Hulk and Thor are on it,” Natasha reported calmly.  “We’re just taking care of the last of the suits.”

“Great.  We’ll just wait for you, then,” Tony sighed and slumped down next to Steve.

He _knew_ he wasn’t going to be lucky enough for Steve to just want to sit in silence while they -

“This is a good time to talk, then,” Steve said muting his mic, and Tony wanted to slam his head against the wall, but resisted.  It would be a sign of weakness.  (Plus his head was kind of hurting.)

“Nothing to talk about,” was what he actually said aloud, after also muting his mic, leaving JARVIS to monitor the coms to listen for if the others needed to talk to them.

Steve side-eyed him a look.

“Nice try.”  He took a deep breath and winced when it pulled at his side.  “You were right, we can’t trust you in a battle.”

Tony flinched.  For all he thought he deserved it, he hadn’t expected Steve to actually _say_ it.  He was angry with himself to find it still hurt.

He flinched again when he saw Steve watching him, frowning.

“No, not like that.  I trust _you_ , Iron Man,” Steve said, sounding exasperated.  “But in a fight, you keep going off on your own, taking needless risks.   _That_ isn’t trustworthy.”

Tony frowned.

“They’re not needless.  I run the numbers, and do whatever is most likely to result in a win.  Besides, if you count the actual time any of us have been superheroes, I’ve actually been doing this even longer than _you_ , Winghead, if being on ice doesn’t count.“

Now Steve was frowning in confusion.

“I’ve read your file, but Bruce, or Natasha and -”

“Working as spies for SHIELD doesn’t count,” Tony cut him off.  “and neither does Hulking out while on the run.  I’m only counting time when any of us were considered heroes by the general public.  Of that, I have more than any of you.”

Steve sat in silence for a long moment, considering this.

“That still doesn’t justify putting yourself in danger all the time.”

Tony laughed, the sound coming through the speakers as static again.

“That’s part of the job description, Cap.  Hate to break it to you.”

Steve shook his head, peering at Iron Man again, as if the helmet could give anything away.

“You don’t rely on us as much as you should.”

Tony opened his mouth to keep arguing, but the pressure in his head made him woozy for a second, and he lost the train of his argument, blinking through the pressure in his head.

Abruptly the thought crossed his mind that he was sitting way too close to Captain America, and then he blinked out of the fogginess and shook himself quickly to keep it away.

“Shellhead?”

Tony realized he hadn’t responded, and tried to remember what Steve had last said.

Oh, right.  Teamwork.

“I guess I’m not used to having to work with others yet,” he muttered, not looking at Steve.

He heard the sigh from next to him.

“Try, okay?  You’re a good team player when any of _us_ are at risk.  Let us do the same.”

Tony’s throat felt uncomfortably full for a moment, and he jerked his head in a nod once before turning his attention back to the coms.

“Hey, what’s the hold up out there?”  He asked, and Steve twitched next to him at the sudden change in topic, wincing as he jarred his side again.

“Nearly there,” Barton called back, and less than five minutes later, a few of the beams above them shifted, and Tony stood as a gap cleared, and he could see daylight briefly, before it was blocked by Barton’s head and above him, the Hulk, both peering down at them.

“If you two are done playing sardines, how about you take your turn getting yelled at by Fury?”  Barton asked.

Tony snorted.

“Not a chance.  That’s Steve’s job, and you ex-SHIELD monkeys.”

He glanced down at Steve in time to catch him rolling his eyes.

“Need a hand up?”  He asked, holding out one of his gauntlets, and he hauled up Steve and when the gap above them was wide enough, flew them both out of the hole.

“Nice talk,” he muttered quietly to Steve.  “Let’s not do it again.”

\---

On the flight back, Tony took the quinjet despite being about to outfly it in his suit, and after brushing off the others’ concerns about whether he was injured or not, insisting he was just bruised a little, he headed back into the workshop.

Pulling off the suit, Tony’s head swam again, and he quickly pulled on one of his general-use undersuits and a pair of sweats before grabbing a few painkillers, swallowing them down, and collapsing on the couch.

“J, run diagnostics on the suit and if there’s anything you can fix without me, do it.  Leave anything else for when I wake up.”

“Sir, you shouldn’t sleep with a concussion,” JARVIS intoned.

But Tony was already out, his normal button-sized sleeping sedative injector peeling off and falling to the ground next to the couch as he snored into the cushion.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, admit it, you would have KILLED me if I did a chapter split after the collapse again. Which I was so tempted to do. XD
> 
> And you totally wanted Steve's head on a stick for a moment when he said Iron Man wasn't trustworthy, didn't you. >:D
> 
> (On the Iron-Man-has-been-a-superhero-longest point, I'm not sure if that's MCU canon, but it seemed close enough that I went for it. If I'm wrong, my bad, I call writer's freedom to wing it. ;P)
> 
> And on a me-note, I found out what was/is wrong with me! It's an acid reflux thing, there's a medication they want me to try, and hopefully it'll stop being such an issue! It means I have to cut down on caffeine and chocolate, among other things, though, which BOOOOOOO. I AM A COFFEE ZOMBIE ALREADY. (ノ ゜Д゜)ノ ︵ /(.□. \）  
> I do still have a few deadlines this week for Thursday and Friday, so the weekend update might be actually on Sunday instead of Saturday night based on how tired I am and how much I can write, but I won't make you wait a week. :)
> 
> (Also if anyone reads YODT too, I haven't forgotten its update for today, but I'm exhausted and I'm going to try to have it up by end-of-Wednesday my time, since I'm not done with it now.)


	14. Intervention

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So Iron Man and Steve have ironed out a few things...now it’s Tony’s turn...maybe.
> 
> Time for a mostly-Bruce’s-POV chapter again! This isn’t one of the shortest chapters, but as it isn’t a fighting chapter, and I had to break before the next *ahem* big event happened, it’s not as long as the previous one either. (It's around the average.)

“Sir?”

JARVIS tried to wake Tony up for a solid thirty minutes, even recruiting Dummy to help prod him awake, while the other bots made distressed noises in the background.

It was times like these which made having no physical form rather inconvenient.

When JARVIS had to admit defeat, he was left with the conundrum of what to do.  First, he called Colonel Rhodes, but he was away on mission.  Then, he tried Ms. Potts, but she was in the middle of a meeting she could not leave.

He deliberated for several minutes, and then made his decision.

“Doctor Banner?”

Bruce looked up, and so did the other Avengers draped on various chairs and couches around the common room, relaxing post mission.

“Yes, JARVIS?”  The doctor replied, shifting the blanket someone had wrapped around his shoulders.

“Sir could use your assistance downstairs.”  JARVIS said, well aware of the presence of the other Avengers in the room.

A look of concern crossed Bruce’s face before he hid it from the other Avengers.

“I’ll be down in a minute, JARVIS,” he replied, getting up with the blanket around his shoulders.

“Is something wrong?”  Steve asked, from his place on another couch, muting the television.

“There is no need for concern, Captain,” he said, as the doors of the second elevator closed after Bruce.

Once he was gone, Steve turned to Natasha.

“Why did that feel like an evasion rather than an answer?”  He asked.

“Because it was,” she replied grimly, also concerned.

In the elevator, Bruce was also worried.

“What’s wrong, JARVIS?”

“Sir fell asleep with a concussion, and I cannot wake him up now.”

Bruce’s frown deepened.

“How long has he been asleep?” He asked, slipping into his professional voice.

“A few hours,” he said, “since you returned from the mission.”

Bruce exited the elevator as soon as it reached the workshop floor, hurrying over to where Tony was still sleeping on the couch.

“Tony?”

Bruce shook Tony’s shoulder, gently but firmly, aware that any touch would probably be causing him pain.  Then his eye fell on the pain medication in the open drawer nearby, and the fallen sedative injector on the ground.

“JARVIS, what did he take?”

“Pain medication and a sleeping sedative,” JARVIS said, and despite his voice not changing, he seemed to radiate disapproval.

“With a concussion?”  Bruce shook his head.

Dummy, distressed, rolled up behind Bruce and his claw head tilted around like a concerned puppy as he beeped and squeaked worriedly at Bruce.

“He’ll be okay,” Bruce reassured the bot, patting his claw head, before turning back to Tony.

Unwilling to try drastic measures to wake up Tony unless his vitals lowered, Bruce hooked him up to a heart monitor (that he had a heart monitor in a side room of the workshop worried Bruce) and waited, Dummy pushing over a chair with You’s assistance.  The two bots chirped when Bruce patted them again, and then You rushed off to do who-knows-what while Dummy stood guard with Bruce, Bruce patting and scratching at the claw head absently.

Bruce was reading a science article JARVIS pulled up for him on one of Tony’s tablets when he finally stirred.

The tablet was immediately discarded on the nearest table.

“Tony?  Can you hear me?  How are you feeling?”

Tony blinked in confusion, clearly still groggy and not thinking clearly yet.  He floundered around clumsily for a couple minutes before the bleariness in his eyes cleared, and then he was staring, confused.

“Bruce?  What are you doing here?  J?”

“JARVIS called me when he couldn’t wake you up.  Did you know you had a concussion when you went to sleep?”

“Yes, I’m fine, neither of you needed to wo….rry,” Tony said, and at the end, his voice trailed off.

He paled, and Bruce grew concerned again.

“Tony?  Talk to me, are you feeling okay?”

Then Bruce realized Tony was staring at something behind him, and he turned to see parts of the Iron Man armor scattered around the floor.  He’d not even realized it was there before, too focused on helping Tony, but it was clear Tony had simply peeled off the armor before crashing on the couch.

“You knew,” Tony said, and Bruce could hear the dread in his voice.  “Back then, you knew, didn’t you?”

Bruce flinched when he realized the connection Tony had made.

_Right.  Tony Stark didn’t get the concussion, Iron Man did._

Add in the discarded armor and the burns, and it was too clear Bruce had figured out the secret.

While Bruce was thinking, Tony turned to glare at the nearest camera.

“JARVIS?”  He demanded.

“Doctor Banner confided in me when he reasoned that Tony Stark and Iron Man were the same person,” he admitted, and Bruce realized that he still wasn’t actually confirming the fact with his careful wording.

Tony buried his face in his hands.  Bruce let him think, sitting quietly.

“Do the others know?”  Tony demanded finally.

“No,” Bruce replied, “I only told JARVIS that I knew.”

Tony looked up at him, a challenge in his eyes.

“Why not?  You knew I lied to you, _again_ , why wouldn’t you tell them the truth?”

“It’s not my secret to reveal.  You have your reasons, it’s not my place to tell them.  I still think you should, though.  Even if they take it badly, they’ll get over it.”

Tony shook his head, and Bruce wasn’t surprised.

“I told you before, in the suit...they would think of Iron Man differently.  They seem to accept him again now, but Tony Stark is still the man who doesn’t care, to them.  Iron Man is the soldier.  Without the armor, I’m just the ex-Merchant of Death, with more blood on my hands then any of you.  Even the Other Guy,” he added as Bruce flinched at the mention of blood, forgoing the nicknames for once.

“Tony,” Bruce began again, only to be waved off.

“Leave it,” he insisted, and Bruce quieted.

Then Tony stood - or tried to.

He wobbled on his feet, and Bruce reached out to steady him.  Tony flinched when Bruce’s hand carefully grabbed his arm, but he nodded in thanks after a moment.

“Pain medicine, sedatives, and a concussion don’t mix,” Bruce said, letting only a little of his disapproval show in his voice.

Tony winced.

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to try that one again.”

“You should eat, do you keep any food down here?”  Bruce asked, changing the subject as Tony kept wobbling uneasily on his feet.

“No, Dummy keeps using anything he can find to make smoothies.”  The thought brought a half-smile to Tony’s face.

Bruce smiled too, confusedly.

“Are they any good?”  He asked, eyeing the bot in question as he zoomed around the workshop, happy Tony was awake again.  He kept bumping into things, and the other bots.

“Not exactly.  He doesn’t quite understand what is edible.  There was a wrench in the last one.  Broke the blender.”

That drew a laugh from Bruce.

“Okay, no food down here.  I’ll help you up to the kitchens?”

“You going to cook again?”  Tony asked, an exaggerated pleading expression on his face.

Bruce snorted.

“Sure.  Let’s go.”

Bruce slung Tony’s arm carefully around his shoulders and steered the still-clumsy man into the elevator, but Tony did manage to hold most of his own weight.

It wasn’t until the elevator doors pinged open that Bruce thought about the other Avengers.

He winced when the doors opened and all eyes turned towards them.

Next to him, Tony flinched, and Bruce belatedly realized how this would seem to the others - without knowing about the concussion, Tony looked wasted.

Not exactly the best way to redeem the Avengers’ opinion of the man behind the armor.

Bruce gave the others a _look_ , warning them to ignore the situation, and Jane and Natasha seemed to take the hint, tugging Barton, Thor, and Darcy back around to focus on the television, showing some movie Bruce hadn’t seen.

Steve stared longer, but Bruce stared back warningly, and while his mouth opened slightly and Steve looked concerned, he turned back eventually without saying anything.

Bruce walked Tony into the kitchen and sat him on a chair while he brought out pots and pans, deciding to make a soup, and started Tony at chopping vegetables.

Things were fairly quiet while they cooked, the two scientists falling into a focus not dissimilar from how they worked together in the lab or workshop.

Their focus stayed unbroken until Barton stuck his head through the doorway.

"Okay, that smells great.  You two willing to share, or excluding us commoners?"

Tony twitched slightly at the intrusion but brushed it off easily.

"I guess we can include you peasants," he replied with a dramatic sigh, and Bruce smiled.

"There's going to be enough for everyone," he said, "except maybe Thor and Steve, but they can at least have normal mortal portions."

Barton grinned.

"I thank you on behalf of us mortals," he said, and then picked up a knife when Tony silently passed him some more vegetables to chop, and they got back to work.

Half an hour later, the soup was done and ladled into bowls.

Bruce called the others to sit down after getting Tony, who was cradling a cup of coffee, seated.

Barton rocketed up next, and the others followed a little more orderly.

The meal passed in peace, and Bruce thought they'd made it through unscathed.

Then -

"Tony?"

Bruce and Tony both looked up at Steve, and although he looked concerned, not angry, Bruce felt dread again.

_Oh no_ , he thought.  He was afraid this would happen, and despite Steve's good intentions, he doubted Tony was going to handle this well.

Tony looked up with a resigned expression on his face, and Bruce had to admit that he did still look drunk.

"Steve." He replied, knowing what was coming.

The two scientists glanced at each other, and Bruce tried to silently plead with him to just tell the others what was really wrong.

Tony received the message, but shook his head slightly.

Steve and the others watched this exchanged uncomprehendingly.

"Look, Tony, " Steve began, and Bruce sighed.

"Steve, don't," he tried, but Tony kicked him under the table and he stopped.

Steve glanced at him but didn't stop.

"I'm not trying to start a fight again, but the whole team is worried.  If JARVIS has to call Bruce and then you come up here and can barely stand, we worry.  We care about you too, not just Iron Man and your money or your tower.  You're not just a landlord."

"You're part of the team too," Natasha added, keeping her straight face firmly in place.

Bruce wanted to bang his head against the table, but that would have been a bit of a giveaway,  so he settled for staring into his soup and stabbing at some of the carrots floating in it with his spoon.

Tony just looked really uncomfortable.

When he didn't reply, Steve and Natasha shared glances again.

"Look, this is an intervention," Steve said, "we're worried about you, Tony."

Steve's face said he was preparing for a fight, and not looking forward to it.

But Tony surprised both him and Bruce by quietly nodding.

"What?  You...agree?"  Steve asked, and Tony sighed in response.

"Yeah.  Sure.  I won't drink anymore.  You can get rid of the alcohol, or keep it in your rooms, or whatever.  Or dump it, I don't care."

Abruptly Tony got up from the table, picked up one bottle from the middle which Bruce recognized as the one he always drank from, and he proceeded to dump it down the sink.

Around the table, everyone was shocked by how calmly Tony was taking the intervention.

Knowing more than the others, Bruce suspected that meant Tony knew something the others didn't.

But without any argument to spark a fight, the tense atmosphere the other Avengers were giving off dissolved into an air of confusion.

"Okay, there's one gone, for symbolism or whatever," Tony said, shrugging.  "Keep whatever you want, we can get rid of the rest.  Leave the red bottles in the back, those are Rhodey's favorites, I'll call him to pick them up.  Is that it?"

When everyone else was too off-balance to answer, Tony nodded.

"Good.  Now that's settled, I have more work to do," he said, spooning a little more soup into his bowl and looking to Bruce.  "Coming?"

Bruce blinked and got to his feet with his bowl in hand, walking close to a far-steadier Tony as they both returned to the elevator and the workshop, leaving the other Avengers confused at the lack of a fight.

Once the elevator doors closed, Tony leaned more against Bruce, revealing some of the bravado that had steadied his movements earlier.

"Are you really okay with all of them thinking you're an alcoholic?"  Bruce asked quietly.

Tony let out a sigh.

"It's better than telling them.  No reason not to believe it, anyway, it runs in the family after all."

Bruce flinched, but followed Tony as the elevator doors opened again.

Dummy immediately zoomed over and took Tony's weight on one side, taking unusual care in helping Tony to the couch, where he plopped down and then scooted over enough to one side for Bruce to join him.  They both finished their food in a companionable silence.

"It won't affect how they think of Iron Man anyway," Tony finally added, and Bruce had to think for a moment before he remembered what thought Tony was continuing.  "How they think of Tony Stark doesn't matter nearly as much."

Bruce watched him, and saw the signs of resigned disappointment in his face which Tony was unwilling to voice.

"I think it does,"  he said quietly, and since he knew better than to pat Tony on the back, he scratched at Dummy's robotic claw, earning himself a pleased croon.  Then he returned to the work he'd begun earlier on the tablet he'd discarded on Tony's desk.

“What was really in that bottle?”  Bruce asked after a moment.

Tony glanced up at Bruce for a moment, not expecting the question.

“I made it.  Tastes like brandy, without the alcohol.”

Bruce nodded, unsurprised, and dropped the point.

Tony sat quietly next to him for a long moment before returning to his own work, repairing and modifying the suit.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, so for the next chapter I have to do reading research, so if the research takes too long, I may have to skip the Wednesday update, but I’ll still aim for making it if I can. I'm really not sure if I'll make it.
> 
> If I ever miss updates without warning, by the way, I will try to post explanations on my tumblr (tiredtypingandtea) with the tag “withasideofangst AO3”.


	15. It All Comes Tumbling Down

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, what could go wrong with a chapter title like that?
> 
> -flees pitchforks...and other projectiles-

Tony was running tests on his latest upgrade to the suit when it happened.

“Sir, we have a security breach in the tower,” JARVIS reports, and Tony freezes.

“What is the breach?”

JARVIS pulled up security data on Tony’s holoscreens.

“Someone has accessed the building using hacked security codes,” JARVIS replied, pulling up the data.

“J, those are…” Tony trailed off.

“They were Howard Stark’s codes, Sir. Someone has inserted them back into the system.”

“This hack,” Tony said, voice far tenser than even a moment before, “it’s similar to the earlier one.  We need to find this bastard, J.  We need to find him _now_.  Sound the Avengers alarm and patch me through to them.”

“Yes, Sir.”

“Tony?”  Steve’s voice was clear over the building’s com systems, despite the blaring alarms.  He sounded a little winded, like he’d been interrupted mid-workout.

“JARVIS detected a security breach in the tower, a hack using dear old dad’s security codes.  We think it’s the same hacker as before, and there might be intruders in the tower.  We’re initiating lock down, and I’ll send Iron Man up in a moment.”

Over the coms, Tony could hear the sounds of the other Avengers putting their gear on.

“Keep us posted, we’ll be ready.”

Tony terminated the connection and started disconnecting wires from his suit.

“J, you know the drill.  Start lock down procedures.  Monitor the servers, we need to see if this guy’s got his fingers anywhere else that we’ve missed.  When this is done, we’re doing a security overhaul.”  Tony said, pulling on his undersuit.

“Yes, Sir.  Initiating transfer to back-up server one.”

Dummy rolled up to Tony as the suit finished closing around him, and Tony patted the claw head carefully with his gauntleted hand.

“Hey, bud, time for you guys to hide.  Remember what to do?”

Dummy whirred affirmatively, and for once listened promptly, as he and the other bots rolled quickly away into the reinforced safe built into one of the walls.

They were making distressed noises as Tony closed the door after them, then headed to the elevator.

Activating the coms inside his helmet so he could still speak as Tony Stark, he addressed the Avengers again.

“I’m sending Iron Man up to you, I’ll keep an eye on the cameras with JARVIS.”

“Got it, Tony, thanks.  We’ll take care of this.  Iron Man, meet us in the common room,” Steve replied.

“On my way,” Tony replied again, as Iron Man, and he rocketed up the elevator shaft.

He exited on the common floor and all eyes glanced at him before the others continued pulling on gear.

“Does JARVIS have eyes on the intruders yet?”  Natasha asked.

Tony opened his mouth to answer.

And the entire building shuddered as the primary elevator shaft blew, knocking them all to the ground.

“What the hell was that?” Barton shouted over the sudden ringing in their ears.

“JARVIS?”  Tony demanded.

“Charges detonated in the elevator shaft.  Evacuation proceeding via the emergency stairwells.  The building has been structurally compromised.”

“Are there any injuries or casualties?”  Steve asked, climbing to his feet and then helping Barton up too.

Tony picked himself off the floor and then went to Bruce’s side, pulling him to his feet.

“Hey, you okay?  Not going green on us?”

“I’m okay,” Bruce said, leaning against a wall.

“Sirs, the cameras have been shut down, I cannot find the intruders,” JARVIS spoke up again.  “Civilian evacuation complete.  Doctor Foster and Miss Lewis have been evacuated as well.”

“Thank you, friend,” Thor said, also getting to his feet.  “Then let us find whoever dares attack our home.”

“Wait, JARVIS, what about Tony?”  Steve asked, glancing up again.

Tony froze.

He muted his mic and was about to tell JARVIS to confirm he got out too when the building shook again, a massive tremor strong enough to send them all to their feet again.

“What _now_?”  Steve demanded.

“Total collapse of the lower levels.  The tower’s stability has been completely compromised,” JARVIS replied again.

“ _Where’s Tony_?”  Steve shouted again.

“Well, the good news is, you can all live rent-free from now on,” a new voice spoke over the coms.

Everyone froze again, glancing at each other.

“Who is this?”  Tony demanded, speaking as Iron Man.

“The bad news is, you’re not going to get any more shiny new toys from your landlord,” the voice continued.

Tony glanced at the other Avengers, and saw the similar look of horror on their faces.  Even Natasha had paled, and so had Bruce, who was staring back at Tony in his suit.

He was going to be in so much trouble when this was over.

“Who the hell are you?”  Steve demanded, furious.

“Now, that’s too easy.  Is this the part where I’m supposed to monologue all my plans to you?  Sorry to disappoint, but I’m not stupid.  I don’t have an argument with the Avengers, but I will stop you if you attempt to stop me.  All I have to say to you is this: Iron Man, how does it feel to have failed your employer?  Good luck stopping me without your mechanic.”

The voice cut off, and the other Avengers were all staring at Tony again.

“Who the hell was that?   _Who just killed Tony to prove a point?_ ”  Steve demanded, and Tony shook his head.

He wanted to say Tony Stark wasn’t dead, but couldn’t while their coms and cameras were hacked.  Not while some unknown enemy wanted him dead.

“I don’t know,” he answered honestly.  “I don’t recognize that voice.”

Natasha and Barton both started asking questions at once, while Thor and Steve argued over how to try to unbury the lower levels, but Tony was distracted by a notification that Pepper was calling.

“Pepper, coms have been hacked,” he warned immediately over the private line, keeping his voice modulator on.

That cut off whatever she was about to say, but she understood his meaning.

“Iron Man, what happened?  The news is flooded with reports of the tower being attacked.”

“Our hacker’s back, he’s in the coms and the cameras, and detonated the elevator shaft and the lower floors.  The workshop is buried...with Stark inside,” he emphasized, aware of the Avengers’ eyes on him, and he heard Pepper gasp on the other end.

“You - what…”  Her voice trailed off, and then she cleared her throat, still sounding afraid.  “We need to talk when you’re done.”

He heard the threat in her voice.

“Yes, ma’am,” he replied seriously, then ended the call.

“Sirs, I hate to interrupt again, but the building is structurally unsound.  You need to evacuate.  The quinjet is powered up and waiting for you on the roof,” JARVIS injected.

“We can’t leave Tony behind,” Steve insisted, glaring at the ceiling.

“Respectfully, Captain, there’s nothing you can do about the basements.  The Avengers are needed, and if you stay in the building, you won’t be able to help anyone.”

“Cap, we have to go,” Barton said, resigned, pulling slightly on his arm.

The Avengers hurried up to the quinjet, and Tony followed them into the jet before they took off, standing away from the others, avoiding the star Bruce was still fixing on him.

Minutes after they took off, a third set of charges blew, as if waiting for them to leave, and the new round of blasts were enough to collapse the building entirely.

Tony watched from live news feeds in his HUD as his building collapsed.

The hacker must have tipped off the press, as there were already announcements scrolling along the bottom of the feeds, speculating that Tony Stark might be the only casualty.

He was going to be in _big_ trouble.

The Avengers flew in a tense silence, Tony giving directions to Barton to take them to Stark Mansion.

He’d already outfitted the place long ago as a back-up for the tower, but never thought it would be necessary this soon.

Pepper called again mid-flight, and he told her where they were going with cryptic hints, in case the signal was still being hacked, and she agreed to meet them there.

Tony didn’t speak again for the rest of the flight, even when Bruce came to sit next to him, silent but stern.

_That_ wasn’t going to be a fun conversation, either.

Pepper arrived at the mansion not long after they landed in the back yard, and immediately walked up to Tony in his suit, gestured for him to follow her, and they disappeared into his workshop in the basement, leaving confused Avengers behind them.

Once they were inside and the doors sealed, she rounded on him.

“We can talk in here?”

“JARVIS, mute all microphones and cut off all cameras,” Tony said, without disabling his modulators.

“At once, sir,” JARVIS said, and then fell silent.

“Okay, we’re clear,” Tony said, pulling off his helmet.

“What is going on, Tony?”  Pepper demanded.

“I don’t know, Pep.  Our hacker came back, took over the coms and the cameras without us even noticing, and blew the building.  The lower floors collapsed, and there was no way to say I made it out without the hacker overhearing.”

Pepper’s jaw dropped.

“So they - the rest of the Avengers, they think you’re dead?”

“Yes,” Tony replied, grimly.  “Well, except Bruce.”

“Bruce?  Doctor Banner?  What do you mean?”  Pepper asked.

“He figured it out,” Tony replied, pacing.  “He knows.”

Pepper was silent for a long moment, long enough for Tony to turn and look at her.

She had a hand clapped to her mouth, staring at him.

“It’s all gone wrong, Pep,” he said, “but I can’t tell them now.  Not until we find this guy.”

Pepper nodded slowly.

“You get him, Tony, and then I swear to god, if _you_ don’t tell them, _I_ will.”

Tony grimaced, but nodded.

“Do you have any clues who he is?”

“We came straight here,” Tony replied, shaking his head.  “I didn’t recognize his voice.  JARVIS?”  He asked, replacing his helmet and turning the voice modulators back on, before unmuting the microphones.

“Yes, sir?”

“Do you have anything more on the hacker?”

“I have been reviewing the camera footage between the time the hacked codes were used and the cameras went out,” JARVIS replied.

“Wait, hacked codes?”  Pepper asked.

“The hacker gained entrance to the building by reinserting Howard Stark’s security codes into the system.”

Pepper stared at him again.

“Oh my god,” she said, barely more than a whisper.

“Sir, I believe I have located the hacker on camera,” JARVIS said after a pause.

“Show me,” Tony said, pulling up a holoscreen.  “Stark’s private server only, don’t use the Avengers server for anything.”

“On your screen now,” JARVIS said, and a clear image popped up in front of him.

The man had baggy clothes on, and they could only see his face clearly, but he had brown hair and eyes, and looked to be around Tony’s age, maybe a little younger.

Tony didn’t have a clue who he was.

“Any hits on facial recognition?”  He asked JARVIS.

“No, sir.”

“Oh my god,” Pepper muttered, and Tony turned to stare at her.

“Wait, you know this guy?”  He asked, surprised.

She gaped at the image for a moment longer before snapping out of it.

“I...yes, I do.  Ah... _Tony_ knows him, too.”

Tony stared at her though the helmet.

“Enlighten me,” he said, confounded.

“That’s Ezekiel Stane,” she answered, still gaping at the image. “ He attended a few of SI’s fund raisers with his father before...Before he dropped off the grid”   When Tony didn’t reply, she glanced at him and inferred the dumbfounded expression he had on underneath the helmet.

“Zeke Stane.   _Obadiah Stane’s_ son.”

\---

When Tony and Pepper returned upstairs, they found very impatient Avengers waiting for them.

“Iron Man, what the hell is going on?  If you two know something -”  Steve began, but Tony cut him off.

“JARVIS found camera footage of the hacker.  Pepper ID’ed him as Ezekiel Stane.”

“Stane...as in, Obadiah Stane?  Tony’s godfather?”  Barton asked.

Tony nodded.

“His son,” Tony replied.

“Then he’s after you,” Natasha said, “for killing his father?”

“It seems likely,” Tony said, tensely.  He felt everyone’s eyes on him, and avoiding meeting any of their gazes, until he risked a glance at Bruce, who looked more concerned than anything else.

There was a long moment of silence, and then it was broken by Steve punching a hole in the wall.

“ _Captain_ ,” Pepper gasped.

“Sorry,” Steve bit out.  “We just...we all failed today.  We lost a man.”

He shook his head and walked out, head bowed.

Depression settled over the rest of the room, and Bruce slipped out, subtly catching Tony’s attention first and gesturing towards the door.

“I’ll talk to him,” Tony muttered, and left the room after them.

Bruce was waiting in the hall, and Tony led him into the library.

“We can talk in here?”  Bruce asked, and Tony nodded.  He’d had JARVIS transfer the camera and microphone feeds to his private server, which was still secure.  The Avengers’ server was unusable for the moment, but for now at least the mansion was safe.  As safe as could be expected, anyway.

“Good,” Bruce said.  “What are you doing, Tony?  Why haven’t you told them you’re alive?”

“I couldn’t, before, with the hacker...Stane...listening,” Tony said, defensive.

“And now?  Clearly we can talk in here.”

“I...not like this.  Pepper gave me an ultimatum.  Once we catch Stane, either I tell them...or she will.”

Bruce frowned, watching Tony carefully.

“I don’t like this,” he said, and Tony nodded.

“I know.  I’m sorry.”

Bruce sighed.

“I don’t agree with this, but I promised you I wouldn’t reveal your secret.  But Pepper’s right.  They need to know, Tony.  You’re making them grieve when they don’t have to.”

Tony didn’t have a reply to that, and eventually Bruce walked away without one.

After a moment, Tony headed after Steve, getting JARVIS to tell him where Steve was.

As he’d guessed, Steve was in the gym, beating his punching bags to a pulp.

When he walked in, Steve didn’t stop, although Tony knew Steve heard him come in.

He wasn’t exactly silent, in the Iron Man suit.

“Winghead,” he said, finally.

“Not now, Iron Man,” Steve said, breathing hard.

Tony sighed.

“It’s not your fault, Cap.  If anything, it’s mine.”

“No, Iron Man.  Before the Avengers formed, you would have been with him.  You’re his bodyguard.  But we moved in, without even thinking about the danger that put him in, and now we failed to protect him.  It’s our faults.”

Steve stopped punching the bag and just held onto it, resting his forehead against it.

Tony felt his guilt deepen.

“Cap...that’s not what happened.  This is because _I_ killed Obadiah Stane.  I’m the target, not...Stark.  It’s _not_ your fault.  I’m to blame, not anyone else...Eventually you’ll believe me, and I’m sorry.”

With Steve still staring after him, Tony walked out, feeling worse than ever.

They were never going to forgive him for this.

He wasn’t sure he was going to forgive _himself_.

\---

One week later, with no luck finding Stane or Tony Stark’s “remains” in the ruins of the tower, the Avengers were discouraged and the media was comfortable declaring Tony Stark to be dead, even though the Avengers refused to allow it be officially declared without a body.

But the media weren’t the only ones who didn’t seem to need the official declaration.

When Pepper got the call, she immediately headed over to the mansion, which the media was already re-dubbing Avengers Mansion.

She told Tony first, in his workshop - the only place he could walk around without the suit on anymore.

He nearly punched a hole in the wall himself.

Then he had to ask Pepper to tell the other Avengers, because he didn’t want to be in the room when they heard.

She refused.

And so moments later, he was standing in the Iron Man suit, next to Pepper and across from the other Avengers, in the living room which had become their new common room.

They all still looked depressed.  The mansion had been a depressing place since they arrived, and Tony couldn’t blame them, since it was his fault.

The looks on their faces only grew worse when Pepper told them Tony’s lawyers were beginning to look at his will, although nothing could be released until his body was found.

Steve nearly walked out of the room, before Natasha grabbed his arm and told him to stay.

Tony had to stand by and listen while Pepper told them what Tony already knew - he’d left his shares of SI to Pepper, insanely large amounts of money to her and Rhodey, and of what was left (which was still an insanely high number), some went to various charities he regularly contributed to, and the rest went to the Avengers as a group, with specific amounts set aside for Bruce and Jane to continue their research.

The amounts left to the group and each scientist were enough to keep them all in business for longer than any of them would be alive.

But what really shocked the Avengers were his instructions for his bots and JARVIS, all left to the Avengers under the condition that SHIELD never get their hands on them, and if anything happened to the Avengers, JARVIS had already been instructed on what to do.

(Tony would never admit that might involve JARVIS uploading himself to the internet, so he could never be deleted.)

Tony had also left a request for Bruce to care for the bots (a request that could be carried out once they were unburied), as they would miss being around his workshop, and Bruce’s lab was the next closest thing on hand.

By the time Pepper stopped reading, all of the Avengers were trying to hide watering eyes, and Tony was feeling mortified.

Pepper glared at him before she left.

Once she was gone, Steve paced, looking like he wanted to put another hole in the wall.

“How can they just give up on him so quickly?”  He vented.

“Steve...to be fair, no one could survive a building collapsing on them,” Barton said, and then paused, glancing at Tony and Steve.  “Well, without a metal suit or a supersoldier serum, anyway.”

“They’re not releasing anything without his body,” Natasha added.

“Still,” Steve said, but he was losing steam.  “We just...we have to find Stane.  We have to avenge him.”

“We will,” Tony said, wanting to sink straight through the floor.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have two polls for you guys, about future fics. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions about them. :)  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll357965x26193650-14  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll358903x43bE8B4D-14
> 
> And I have a dilemma, I don’t want to add Ezekiel to the character tags because it’s a spoiler, but...Argh. Opinions?


	16. The Bigger They Are...

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah...I hope you all liked the fluff earlier in the fic… x_X I’m estimating three more chapters are left, for a total of nineteen, maybe twenty.
> 
> This one is mean...good luck. -throws fluffy things-

The Avengers are only given days before Ezekiel strikes again.

Days during which, Tony avoided the other Avengers, often slipping out of the mansion as quietly as he could and flying to the ruins of Avengers Tower.

The excavation was moving slowly due to the amount of rubble, and the media was becoming more and more certain Tony Stark was dead, if not from the collapse itself, then from bleeding out or starving to death.

Tony’s lawyers shared that opinion, and only the Avengers’ and Pepper’s refusals stopped them from attempting to have Tony declared dead without the body.

The media was only more convinced of his death after some kid freelance photographer at the _Daily Bugle_ got an impossible shot of Iron Man, sitting at the roof’s edge of one of the buildings adjacent to the ruined tower, watching the excavation crews.

The photographer had managed to get the shot right as the sun was setting, and the sky was all oranges and reds, with light reflecting off Iron Man’s armor.

(Unknown to Tony, the photographer was later nominated for a Pulitzer for the shot, although not the piece attached to it, which was much less flattering.)

When he wasn’t at the ruins, Tony was busy in his workshop.

First, he had to lock down the place, turning off all cameras and microphones.  Even so, he left the Iron Man suit on until he’d severed his network entirely from all outside connections, completely cutting off both the mansion and all his servers from the internet and any other incoming or outgoing connections, other than the terminal he was working from.

Then he peeled off his suit and got to work.

He completely stripped down first his firewalls around JARVIS, rebuilding them all.  By the time he was done, there was a newly-rebuilt maze of false-entry points and booby traps built into the firewalls.

Even if someone like Darcy attempted to break in again, and JARVIS didn’t intend to harm the hacker when he blocked them out, the firewalls would completely brick the hacker’s computer and infect any networks it was attached to with a virus.  Then JARVIS or Tony could choose to activate the virus at any point, eating through the networks and destroying them completely, or they could rifle through the network’s files, determining if there was any information they wanted to keep.

It was a much more aggressive defense than before.

Once that was done, Tony stripped down and rebuilt similar defenses around his private server, the Avengers server, and SI’s, and the did the same to his camera system, the Avengers’ coms, and all their phones.

When that was complete, he tried to hack into his own systems.  Any time he found a hole, he patched it.

Then he secured everything with several master keys, then buried them and several false keys in the most protected part of JARVIS’ code.

Then he built even more, dynamic, firewalls around JARVIS, making them constantly changing, and far stronger than anything else currently in existence.  Then he gave JARVIS access to those firewalls, so if technology changed and there was a higher level of encryption available, JARVIS wouldn’t have to wait for Tony to improve the firewalls.

He could do it himself.

When he finally was satisfied, he connected his systems to the internet again, turned back on his cameras and microphones in the mansion, and put back on the suit, returning to the tower.

He was still watching the crews work, about to reach his workshop, when the call came in.

“Pepper?”  He asked, answering the call and leaving his modulators off, as he’d already alerted both her and Rhodey to his newly-secured phone, and theirs, since they both used StarkPhones.

“Tony,” she said, sounding panicked.

“Pep, what’s wrong?”  He asked, sitting up straight.

“Tony, those suits you talked about - they’re attacking SI!”  Pepper said, and it sounded like she was running somewhere.

Tony was rocketing towards SI before she finished speaking.

“I’ll inform the Avengers,” he said, “I’m on my way.  Get somewhere safe, Pepper.  To the mansion, if you can.”

She agreed, and he ended the call, immediately having JARVIS connect him to the Avengers and sound the alarm.

“Iron Man?”  Steve asked, as soon as the call connected.

“Stane is attacking SI!”  He exclaimed over the coms.  “I’m on my way, hurry, the suits are back.”

He could hear the sounds of the Avengers cursing as they grabbed their gear.

“Iron Man, we’re on our way, don’t pull any stupid stunts until we get there,”  Steve cautioned.

“Hey, how can I, you’ve got all the stupid over there with you,” Tony joked back.

When Steve didn’t reply, Tony was confused.

“With Barton,” he added, and smiled slightly at the indignant _“hey!”_ that earned him.

Steve coughed on the other end of the line.

“Uh, yeah,” he said, sounding slightly off.  “Just...be careful.”

“Sure, Cap, always am,” Tony quipped back, and terminated the line, before the others could refute him.

Then he called up Rhodey.

“Tony?”  Rhodey answered, sounding worried.  “What’s wrong on?  Pepper told me about the tower, and Zeke.  When were _you_ going to tell me?”

“Uh, never.  Look, yell at me later, Rhodey, I need a favor,” Tony said, nearing SI.

“Oh god, Tony, what did you do?”

Tony could practically see Rhodey drop his head into his hands.

“Nothing...yet.  Just, could you fly over to the tower and get something for me?  They’re just reaching my workshop, you should be able to blast through.”

“Tony, I’m not a courier service.  Why don’t you get it yourself?”  Rhodey asked, exasperated.

“Because Stane is attacking SI,” Tony replied, as SI came into his sight.  “And I can’t get it.  Look, this is what you have to do…”

While Tony was giving an increasingly panicked Rhodey instructions, unbeknownst to him, JARVIS made another call.  The phone was answered just as Tony began engaging the suits.

\---

Tony was swarmed as soon as the suits caught sight of him, and he immediately called Pepper again, checking on her safety.

“Tony, I’m alright,” she said, still sounding afraid, but unharmed.  “I’m nearly at the mansion.”

“Good, stay there.  Have JARVIS initiate lockdown as soon as you’re inside, and stay inside until it’s over, okay?”  Tony ordered, as he blasted one suit out of the sky.

But this time, the suit was back on his tail a moment later, shaking off the blast like it was nothing.

Shit, Tony thought.  The damn things had been upgraded.

Tony cursed and changed direction quickly as more suits dropped on him from above.

“Tony?”  Pepper asked, concerned.

“Gotta go, Pep, I’m a little busy now,” he said, and ended the call.

The quinjet came into sight a moment later, and a figure jumped out.  Halfway down, it grew in size and began to turn a particularly familiar shade of green.

“Hey, buddy,” Tony said, rocketing past the Hulk.  “Care to lend a hand?”

The Hulk roared and leaped into the swarm of suits chasing Tony, taking out several as they slammed into his chest, and swatting even more to the ground.  He ripped one in two, dropping the remains onto the pavement and chasing after Tony to reach more.

“Shellhead, on your left!”

Tony swerved to the right, just in time to dodge a blast from a suit somewhere above him.

“Thanks, Cap,” he quipped back, locating and directing a two-fingered salute at Steve as Tony flew by, watching the shield smash into and ricochet off of one of the suits still in pursuit.

Two more were quickly picked off by explosive arrows, and JARVIS showed in the corner of his HUD where the archer was positioned, on the roof of a nearby building.

Tony flew past him, and arrows picked over several more of the suits, before Tony doubled back, getting too close to the edge of the evacuated area.

He and the other Avengers soon fell into a familiar pattern, luring the suits near one of the Avengers while they picked them off, and turning back whenever Tony got too far away.

He was waiting for the right moment.

Then -

“So, you managed to get Pepper to safety, did you?”

Tony instantly put out his hands and slid to a stop in mid-air, punching one suit in the reactor as it came up too close behind him, before the other suits formed a ring around him and Ezekiel Stane...floating about twenty feet in front of him and slightly above.

Tony could hear the Avengers’ alarmed voices over the coms, but tuned them out.

He was too busy staring at the _suit_ Stane was wearing.

It resembled the Iron Man suit, but not the outdated versions Stane had stolen and modified.

It was far less bulky than even Tony’s latest suit, red and white, with repulsors in the hands and feet like Tony’s suit, but with a rectangular arc reactor and round holes in the helmet instead of Iron Man’s eye slits, which glowed with the same blue glow as the reactor and repulsors.

It was so form-fitting, Tony realized, Stane must have actually embedded not only the arc reactor in his chest like Tony had, but also parts of the suit itself.  The thought of someone doing so _willingly_ made Tony have to swallow past a lump in his throat.

Stane was essentially a _living_ Iron Man suit.

“Stane,” he said, grimly.

“Oh, you figured it out,” Stane replied, not sounding surprised.  “Congratulations.  Here’s your prize - I’ll kill you before your employer’s dear old ex-girlfriend.  So sad you won’t be around to see your failure, yet again, when I kill the person he left his company to.”

“Bring it, Stane.  You want revenge for your father?  He couldn’t beat me either!”  Tony said, egging him on.

Sure enough, Stane blasted himself forward at Tony, and the two collided in mid air.  Both managed to get in a few punches and repulsor blasts, including one from Stane which acted like a taser, zapping Tony in his suit, but not badly enough to distract him for long, the suit taking most of the impact.

Then Stane set the other suits on Tony, and they all flew at him, clinging to his suit, wrecking his ability to fly or dodge Stane, who watched, dodging Thor’s hammer when it came flying towards him, and again on its way back to its owner.

Tony could easily imagine his smirk.

In his earpiece, the other Avengers were still scrambling to get to any positions high enough to interfere, shouting for him to reply.

“Could use some help guys,” he grunted, not taking his attention off of Stane.

He was preparing another shock-blast in his repulsor, and Tony was hard-pressed to turn the mass of suits clinging to him in time for one of them to take the stronger blast.

The suit fell to the ground hundreds of feet below, a smoking pile of fried circuits and metal.

Tony fought down a spike of fear, and struggled harder against the suits as Ezekiel drew closer, this time aiming directly at Tony’s head.

“Any last words, Iron Man?”  Stane asked, and Tony could hear the smile again.

“ _Iron Man!_ ” Steve shouted over the coms, and the other Avengers followed suit, even the Hulk roaring from somewhere below.

“Rhodey,” Tony said quietly, as JARVIS put the call through, “I’m going to need you _really_ soon.”

“Wait, Tony, don’t you _dare_ -”

Tony severed the call again.

“Yeah,” Tony answered Stane, and blasted forward enough to grab onto the front of Stane’s suit.

He wasn’t going to get a better chance.

Rhodey was going to _kill_ him.

“Walk _this_ off, asshole,” he said, and blew the EMP he’d built into his new suit.

The last thing Tony heard before he blacked out, plummeting back towards the ground, surrounded by dead suits and one Ezekiel Stane, was the panicked roar of the Hulk, and the Avengers screaming into his ear.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how declaring someone dead works, so if Tony’s lawyers are not acting realistic by not wanting to wait for the rubble to be cleared, my bad, I claim writer’s license to make things up. It wasn’t allowed to happen, anyway.
> 
> If you’re curious, Ezekiel’s suit design comes from the comics. It looks like this: http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140305022846/marveldatabase/images/0/01/Ezekiel_Stane_(Earth-616)_from_Marvel_War_of_Heroes_001.jpg
> 
> Here are the same two polls as last chapter, for anyone who missed them:  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll357965x26193650-14  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll358903x43bE8B4D-14  
> (You lot aren’t making this easy on me for the second one, it’s been more or less at 50-50 the whole time! -slams head into table-)
> 
> Oh, and some of you in the comments, plus my evil writer friends in the outernet, have given me the idea to make a fic for my Asshole Shorts series, with the premise “what JARVIS would do if Tony were actually killed.” (I’ll change the villain from Ezekiel, however, because I’m not going to spoil this fic with the short. Maybe I’ll do Obadiah…at the end of the first IM movie. >:D)
> 
> Preview for next chapter (-runs for my life-):  
> “Excuse me?” He said, raising an eyebrow.
> 
> “I quit the Avengers,” Tony repeated.


	17. ...The Harder They Fall

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah...Tony’s not taking this well, which you all knew from the preview. I promise this is not how it ends.

Tony woke up in a hospital bed, and immediately he began to panic.  His skin burned, everywhere, from the air and the bedsheets.

There was a heart monitor attached to him, and immediately it began going crazy.  He pulled off the connection, and everything else attached to him.

Suddenly Pepper was at his side.

“Tony, Tony, calm down.  you’re okay,” she said, trying to get him to stop thrashing.

“Pepper?”  He asked, freezing.

“You’re okay.  You self-sacrificing _asshole_ , you’re going to be okay.”

“Pepper...what happened?”  Tony asked, still panicking.  He tried to sit up, but Pepper pushed him back down as gently as she could.

It still hurt, but not as much as Tony’s right arm and his ribs.

A groan slipped out of his mouth.

“ _Tony_ , lie still,”  Pepper scolded.

Tony obeyed, wincing as he leaned back against the pillows.

“What _happened_ , Pep?”

She turned away for a moment to turn off the heart monitor, which had been screaming since Tony had pulled off the connection.

“After you pulled that _bull-headed_ stunt and destroyed all the suits - _yes_ , including Ezekiel’s, before you ask - Bruce caught you when you fell.  That’s why you have two broken ribs and a hairline fracture in your arm, and you’re not dead on the pavement.”  Pepper pinned him with her glare.

“Uh, remind me to thank him?”  Tony said, avoiding her gaze.  “What else?”

Pepper was quiet for a moment, and he met her eyes.  She looked serious, and his stomach dropped.

“What _else_ , Pepper?”

“After you _fried the arc reactor_ ,” Rhodey was too far away to get to you in time.  Plus, when you told him about the spare - and don’t think I’m not doing to _murder_ you, you ass, for planning this _ahead of time_ and not telling anyone - it wasn’t where you said it would be.”

“What do you mean, it wasn’t there?  Pepper, if it wasn’t there, how am I alive right now?”  Tony interrupted, and instantly shrank back when Pepper fixed him with a renewed murderous glare.

“You’re _alive_ because JARVIS called Bruce, right before they reached SI.  Bruce had the Avengers stop by the tower before they came to help.  He got the spare reactor, and Bruce replaced it after he caught you and...stopped being green.  Then JARVIS told him which hospital to take you too.  The same doctors checked you over as after...”  She trailed off, not willing to mention Afghanistan by name.

Tony let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

“Remind me to buy him an island or something,” Tony said, smiling weakly, but the smile died when he saw the serious look still on Pepper’s face.

“There’s something else you’re not telling me,” he guessed.

Her silence was a confirmation.

“ _Pepper_ ,” he demanded.

“After...you fell.  The suit was dead, Bruce was still trying to calm down enough to turn back...so they ripped off your faceplate.”

Tony’s mouth went bone dry.

“They know?”  He asked, but it wasn’t really a question.

Pepper saw the defeat in his eyes, and nodded.

“Tony,” she tried to reassure him, “it’s going to be okay.  They’re all outside, waiting for you.  You can explain it to them, they’ll understand eventually.  But Tony, the media doesn’t know.  We said you were found in your workshop, that you’d taken shelter with Dummy and the others.  They’re okay too, back at the mansion.”

Tony didn’t reply, staring up at the ceiling.  The only thing he could think was that he didn’t deserve to be forgiven for this.

“I’m going to get the nurse,” Pepper said, “and then we can see about getting you out of here, okay?”

“Okay, Pepper,” Tony said, forcing a smile on his face.  “I’m not going anywhere.”  He gestured at his arm and ribs.

Pepper frowned and left the room, closing the door quickly behind her.  Tony could hear her fielding questions from the Avengers outside, but he couldn’t see them, or they him, with the blinds drawn.

Couldn’t let anyone _else_  realize Tony Stark was Iron Man.

As soon as Pepper was out of the room, Tony pushed himself off the bed, ignoring the sharp pain in his side and arm, and looked around the room.

He wasn’t unduly surprised to find the wreckage of the EMP-bearing suit in a case in the corner, and next to it -

“ _Yessss_ ,” he whispered, and grabbed the suitcase suit.

By the time Pepper came back with the nurse, Tony, the suitcase suit, and the destroyed suit were all gone, the window left ajar.

The color drained out of Pepper’s face, before it flooded back as she turned red with anger.

Then she had to tell the Avengers he had run.

Meanwhile, Tony rocketed away from the hospital as quickly as he could, headed out of the city.

He had someone he needed to talk to.

\---

When Tony, still in the suit, walked through the door, the man behind the desk didn’t look up from the file he was reading.

Tony just stared, waiting.

After a long moment, the man sighed and put the file down.

“Stark.  What the hell do you want?”

“I quit,” he said simply, leaving his voice modulators on.

Fury looked up.

“Excuse me?”  He said, raising an eyebrow.

“I quit the Avengers,” Tony repeated.  Then he watched as Fury got out of his chair and strode around the desk.

“You’re not a quitter, Stark.  You’re an arrogant asshole, but you’re not a quitter.  I don’t think you _can_ stop now.”

Tony grimaced, behind the helmet.

“I never said I was going to stop being Iron Man.  I’m just not going to be an Avenger,” he said.

Fury was quiet for a long moment, and Tony stood still, waiting.

“What brought this on, Stark?”  Fury finally asked.

“They _know_.  You should understand why I’m leaving, SHIELD never wanted Tony Stark as an Avenger anyway.  It was always only supposed to be Iron Man,” Tony said, pacing.

Fury was quiet.

“You can’t even argue.  You know I’m right,” Tony said.

“What are you going to do?”

Tony shrugged, then winced as the motion jarred his shoulder and ribs.

“I still have the house in Malibu.  I’ll restart there.  The Avengers can stay in the New York mansion, until the tower can be rebuilt.  I’ll call a moving crew to get anything I need from the mansion or the wreckage of the tower.  And you get your Avengers without Tony Stark attached.”

When Tony left the building and was ready to take off again, JARVIS spoke up.

“Sir.”

“Yeah, J?”  Tony asked, sounding tired.

“The Avengers are asking for you.  They’re worried.”

Tony froze.

“J...I can’t talk to them now.  I...tell them I’m sorry, but I _can’t_.”

“Sir, please, they -”

“JARVIS,” Tony said, and it was more pleading than anything.

“...Yes sir,” JARVIS said, and Tony could feel the disappointment.

Tony flew towards Malibu, trying to outrun his problems and knowing he couldn’t.

Even as he hated himself for it, he ran.

\---

One week.

That’s how long JARVIS gave Tony before he broke programming.

Then he called Pepper.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...So, how many of you just realized the title of this and last chapter are more for Tony than Ezekiel? XD
> 
> Dear Fury: I don't like you. Pretty sure my readers don't now, either.  
> Dear Tony: ..... -throws objects at his head-  
> Dear other Avengers: I am so sorry.  
> Dear JARVIS: -sigh-
> 
> Here are the same two polls as last two chapters, for anyone who missed them:  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll357965x26193650-14  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll358903x43bE8B4D-14  
> (I’m starting to think you all are purposely driving me insane by keeping the “which fic next” poll basically at 50/50 the entire time. -headdesk-)
> 
> Also I’m finishing up the entire fic now, and if I can finish soon, which is the goal, I will try to double-update you guys until the end.
> 
> BTW, anyone who's seen Ant-Man, I will totally geek out with you over Tumblr if you want. (Don't post spoilers for it in the comments.) Anyone who hasn't? It's totally Iron Man 1 + GotG. Also, there are two end credit scenes, don't leave early. >;D
> 
> Next chapter:  
> A tense silence fell again, with Tony looking more like a cornered animal than anything else.
> 
> “You never expected to have this conversation, did you?”


	18. Picking Up the Pieces (Much Glue Required)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> JARVIS is so done with this shit. (And so is the auuuthoooorrrrr. ;P)
> 
> I wanted to make this longer but they just didn't want to keep talking for the moment... XP

Tony had no warning before the door to his workshop in the Malibu house opened, and five worried, _pissed off_ Avengers stormed through.

“What the hell, JARVIS?”  Tony demanded, backing up, feeling suddenly naked without his suit.

“You need to talk to your friends, sir,” JARVIS said, and then fell silent.

Leaving Tony frozen under the stares of his ex-teammates, all the color draining out of his face.

Their faces ranged from stony to angry.  Even Bruce looked somewhat pissed, despite the lack of the Hulk making an appearance.

“Is this the part where one of you hits me?”  He asked, going for humor and missing by several miles.

“How could you, Tony?  Or should I say, Iron Man?”  Steve asked, taking a step forward, and Tony flinched as if he expected Steve to jump forward and hit him.

Which he had expected, if he were being honest.  Or hoped for.

He thought he deserved it.

Steve’s face twitched when he caught the flinch.  For a split second, he looked wounded instead of betrayed and angry.

A tense silence fell again, with Tony looking more like a cornered animal than anything else.

“You never expected to have this conversation, did you?”

Tony flinched again, and his gaze flickered to Bruce.

“You expected to die in that EMP blast, backup reactor or no.  Tell me I’m wrong,” Bruce continued.

Tony didn’t say anything.

“And then, what?  When you survive, you disappear without saying anything?”  Steve demanded.

“Did you think we’d be okay with that?”  Barton pitched in.

Tony turned away, fiddling with anything his wandering fingers could find on his desk.

“I...I knew you wouldn’t be okay with any of it.  I screwed up, okay?  I screwed everything up!”  By the end, Tony was shouting without meaning to be.

He paused and took a deep breath.  The motion pulled at his still-healing ribs, which he hadn’t done any favors by not staying out of the Iron Man suit during the week.

“JARVIS and Pepper and everyone said I should tell you all, but I didn’t...I didn’t want you to know!”  Tony shouted.  “I wasn’t your teammate.  Iron Man was.  And he was _good_ , and didn’t have innocent blood on his hands, and he was…”

“He was whole.”

Tony nearly whispered the words.

He was staring at the ground, unable to meet anyone’s eyes.

This was the last thing he’d ever wanted to happen, and he’d screwed up so badly, he didn’t know how to ever fix it.

“What do you mean, Tony?”  Steve asked, his voice still hurt, but placating.

Talking down a wild animal.

Tony risked a glance at Bruce, and Bruce shook his head ever so slightly.

They still didn’t know.

“You saw,” he said, and his voice came out hoarse.  “You saw the burns after the building fell.  What, did you think that was it?”  A bitter tone entered his voice.  He couldn’t help it.

He paced without looking up at any of them, never coming closer than his desk.

“Ninety-five percent,” he said, his voice barely audible.

“What?”  Steve asked.

“That’s what the doctors said after...Afghanistan.  Ninety-five percent of my body covered in burns that wouldn’t ever heal completely.  Anything that touches my skin, burns.  Even the air burns.  If I stop taking painkillers, the pain would kill me.”

There was another long silence.

“You don’t look burned,” Natasha finally says, her voice softer than he’d ever heard it.

“You worked for SHIELD,” Tony replied.  “Ever used one of those face-changing masks?”

He met her eyes for a moment.  Her face didn’t give anything away, but she nodded.

“I invented them.  I needed it, and ones for my arms and hands.”

He didn’t meet any of their eyes again.

“Tony…”  Steve started, and Tony waved him off.

“Look, it’s not an excuse.  I’m not telling you so you don’t hate me for what I...put you through.  At first, Stane was listening in, and then...I chose not to tell you, even though you all...cared.  I don’t expect you to forgive me. _I_ wouldn’t forgive me.”

“Oh, we’re still mad,” Barton said, and oddly enough, that reassured Tony slightly.  He didn’t know what that said about him.

But anger meant someone cared about what you did.  It was far better than someone simply pretending you didn’t exist.

Belatedly, he realized that was basically what he’d done to the Avengers.

If he didn’t feel like the worst person on the planet before, he sure did now.

“Show us.”

Tony looked up, staring at Steve in horror.

“No,” he said, more in protest than outright refusal.

“Tony, _show us_.  If you really want us to forgive you, if you’re really sorry, you have to start telling us the truth.”

He swallowed down his panic, and after a long moment, everything and anything running through his head, he nodded once.

Then for the first time since he had invented them, Tony turned off his disguisers.

He forced himself to look back at the Avengers, expecting the same horrified expressions he’d seen on Pepper and Rhodey’s faces, which they’d not managed to hide fast enough.  Followed by pity.

(He’d immediately isolated himself from them as much as he could, moving into the then-Stark Tower.)

The looks he saw on their faces were certainly filled with alarm and, but he didn’t see outright horror on any of them.

More importantly to him, there wasn’t any pity.  Anger, yes, but not pity.

After a minute or two under their gazes, Tony turned the disguisers back on.

“Not quite the face of a famous billionaire playboy,” Tony bit out.

“Screw that, Tony, how the hell did you survive that, in the middle of a desert?”  Barton demanded.

Tony snorted.

“I got lucky.  Rhodey was running patrols, looking for me.  They saw me crash the Mark I suit, Rhodey called Pepper from the helicopter, and they flew out burn specialists within an hour.  They told me afterwards that I flat-lined more than once.  Wouldn’t even tell me a number.”

After a pause again, Natasha spoke quietly.

“Did you get them all?  Your files at SHIELD never said.”

He glanced up at her.

She was quiet and still, in the particular way that he’d learned meant she was plotting someone’s very discrete murder.  (Or the very indiscreet ones, as warnings.)

“Yes,” he said, and his voice regained some of his confidence for the first time since the Avengers had walked in the room.

“Too bad,” she replied.  “I’d have liked to have a little talk with them.”

She rested her hand on the hilt of one of her knives, and next to her, Barton nodded in agreement, his face matching hers.

“Sorry to...disappoint you?”  Tony said, raising his hands in an only-half-joking don’t-kill-me motion.

When Tony looked away from the assassin duo and back at the others, he saw Steve and Bruce in particular still looking somewhat angry.

When he met Steve’s eyes, Tony knew they were nowhere near done.

“Guys, could I have a word with our wayward teammate alone, for a moment?”

The others exchanged glances and then filed out, and when Steve pointed at Tony’s desk chair wordlessly, Tony sat, fidgeting with his hands.

Steve sat after a moment, too, and he looked odd, perching at the edge of one of Tony’s work tables.

“You’re not off the hook,” Steve said, “you know that, right?”

Tony nodded, still looking at his hands.

“I guess I should thank you all for not killing me, for real this time,” Tony said.

Unseen by Tony, Steve’s downturned eyes narrowed.

“Did you really think I was going to hit you?  That any of us were going to hit you?”

Tony fidgeted, picking at his nails absently.

“I’d deserve it.  I’d rather you hit me,” he muttered.

“That’s true.  But you don’t know us if you think our first instinct after seeing you alive is to punch you.  Even after you lied to us, and let us think you were dead.”

“What do you want from me, Steve?  What?  Tell me, and I’ll do it.”

Steve sighed, an exasperated sound.

“This isn’t something you can just repair like your suits, Tony.  But for starters, you need to come back with us to New York.  You’re still an Avenger, even if you need to earn our trust back.”

Tony nodded.

“Then I’ll do that.”

Watching them from the cameras, JARVIS was relieved.  Now there would again be others with physical forms to shake Tony out of his shell.  Or just plain give him a shake.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I haven’t been able to find many examples of Tony actually having to talk things out, so a lot of this is just from my impression of Tony in this fic. I hope it’s not too ooc, given how much I deviated from the movies/comics! (Do realize this doesn't make everyone automatically not angry, they're definitely still mad! They're just waiting until they get Tony back on the same half of the country so they can yell at him more.)
> 
> (Also, Steve definitely half wants to murder Tony and half wants to hug him. But he’s the responsible one and knows Tony well enough to tell that either wouldn’t help right now.)
> 
> I'm not 100% happy with this chapter, I could keep editing it forever, but then y'all would kill me more. XP I hope it's okay!
> 
> Same polls as before, for anyone who missed them:  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll357965x26193650-14  
> http://www.poll-maker.com/poll358903x43bE8B4D-14  
> (And still pretty close to 50/50 on the second one! -dies more-)


	19. What Passes for Normal

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, look, it’s the second-to-last chapter and I’m finally done hurting you!

It didn’t take long for Tony to move back to the re-dubbed Avengers Mansion while the tower was being rebuilt.  He hadn’t taken much with him to Malibu.

As soon as he stepped out of the Iron Man suit and walked through the door, something hit him in the chest and, not expecting it, he fell over.

“What the -”

He glanced up, wincing slightly, and saw Dummy and You crowding him, with Dummy’s claw head and camera peering at him closely.  They made distressed beeping noises, and then Tony was getting scolded in beeps and squeaks from two distressed robots.

Steve and the others walked in behind him, and were greeted by the sight of the billionaire trying to pacify the robots following him around like puppies.

“They wouldn’t stay in the basement,” Steve remarked, and Tony glanced at him.

Barton moved past Steve, further into the house, absently patting part of Dummy as he passed.

“They didn’t like being alone,” Barton added, shooting Tony a glance, who looked guilty.

“Then they were okay after the tower collapsed?”  Tony asked.  “JARVIS checked on them and said they made it out in one piece, but I didn’t…”

“They seemed scared, but okay.  The building crews called us when they got them out.”  Steve replied when Tony trailed off.

The bots made more distressed noises if Tony walked more than a few feet away, so he kept patting them as he moved around.  When he reached the kitchen, one of the counter tops looked like some sort of weird appliance war zone.

“Uh...guys?  What happened here?”  He asked, looking back at the others, who were still following a little behind him and the bots, like he’d disappear if they let him out of their sights.

Natasha snorted, eyeing Barton.

Steve sighed and also turned to look at Barton.

“Hey, it wasn’t my fault!”  Barton protested, raising his hands.

Tony squinted at the pieces of plastic, metal, and glass on the counter and thought he recognized some of them.

He turned a horrified stare on Barton, who immediately looked more guilty.

“ _What did my coffee machine ever do to you?_ ”  Tony gasped.

“Hey, it started it!  It wouldn’t work!”  Barton argued.

Tony glared at him.

“There wasn’t an AI in the coffee machine!  It was just a coffee machine!  Although that’s not a bad idea…”

The Avengers groaned.

“Tony, no, that’s a horrible idea,” Steve protested weakly, but Tony ignored him, pulling a tablet seemingly out of nowhere and making notes for JARVIS.

“I don’t care if it can think, as long as it makes me coffee,” Natasha said, glaring at Barton again, who flinched.

“I said I’m sorry!”

“Oh, Tony, when you get a chance, Thor said something weird is going on with the oven, he says things keep disappearing into it.  I told him it was probably just Barton again, but -”

“I told you, I only did that once!”  Barton cut off Steve.

Tony made a mental note of it but ignored the bickering that broke out, sketching out thoughts on his tablet, sitting on one of the couches with the bots at his feet and the arm of the couch like two very big, awkward dogs.

The other Avengers found seats on the same or other couches, and eventually someone turned on a movie.

They’d all missed this odd sort of peace.

\---

The next day, Tony spent much of the morning and afternoon in his basement workshop, but the doors and windows were no longer locked and blacked out.  The Avengers took this as the silent invitation it was, and each spent a few hours just hanging around him.  Sometimes conversation would pop up for short periods of time, but each Avenger was also okay just doing their own work on tablets or maintaining their weapons (and requesting adjustments or additions) while observing their mechanic.

Later in the afternoon, Tony emerged from the basement with one of his portable holoscreens and his tablet, and roped the Avengers into spending a few hours redesigning the plans for the new tower.

Security upgrades ran everywhere in the tower, but Tony wanted help planning space for more Avengers, in case they ever expanded the roster, and designing training rooms and the gym, shooting ranges and Bruce’s lab and the hospital floor.

The vents stayed large for Barton, and security was heightened at the exits and entrances, so only Avengers could access them without alarms and automatic defense systems being triggered.

Halfway through, Darcy burst in, followed by Jane, who had come to see Thor.

Immediately, Darcy began begging for her own floor, and Tony rolled his eyes and groaned as Thor declared his enthusiasm for her and Jane to move into the new tower with them.

Eventually, Tony added Jane rooms on Thor’s floor and made a floor with smaller (but still huge by normal standards) apartments for non-Avengers or guests, and Jane was given her own lab on the floor adjacent to Bruce’s.

Darcy added input here and there while the changes were made, and some of her suggestions were actually good, and added to the plans.

Tony automatically began adding a second elevator to the plans before realizing he didn’t need one anymore, and scrapped it in favor of a single elevator which still reached his workshop.

The others didn’t say anything when they saw the second elevator being deleted from the 3D hologram of the planned building, but they all shared glances among themselves, and small half-smiles which went unnoticed by the concentrating billionaire, who was distracted by Darcy when he had to express why he was _not_ going to build her her own quinjet, and no, Dummy and You would not be her minions, that’s what the baby agents at SHIELD were for.

The impromptu building party was broken up finally when Bruce suggested they start cooking dinner.  Natasha and Barton were recruited to help chop ingredients while Jane kept Thor away from the kitchen (things tended to break or explode around him in the kitchen, and the others were tired of the microwave breaking, so he’d been banned from the kitchen).

Tony helped Bruce assemble the salad and the stew which had become one of the Avengers’ favorite meals, and eventually Steve was called in to referee Darcy and Barton as their snarky comments descended towards a food fight.  (Which finally ended with Natasha’s knife quivering menacingly, the tip buried in the cutting board less than an inch from Barton and Darcy’s hands.  Both let out ungraceful squawks and got back to work.)

When they were done, another movie night took place, and Tony noted that Bruce vacated his normal position by Tony in favor of Steve, who sat a little closer than he really needed to, Tony thought, but brushed off the thought and kept watching the movie.

And if by the time the movie ended, Steve had fallen asleep with his head on Tony’s shoulder, well, no one had proof because Tony had JARVIS destroy the photographic evidence.  (After saving a copy, which he would deny forever.)

The next morning began with extremely annoyed Avengers being woken by a call from Fury, who was pissed he hadn’t been alerted to Tony’s return, which sparked a rather nasty fight between the others and Fury (with Steve being particularly vehement in leading the charge), as Tony hadn’t admitted warning Fury that he was leaving.

Tony backed out of that argument, knowing it wouldn’t end well for him, Instead, he had to appease Pepper when she stopped by and dragged him into the mansion’s library, not letting him out until he finished some paperwork she need from him, for SI, for the tower’s new plans, and to settle the issue of him being not dead with their lawyers.

When they were done, there were more slightly awkward conversations with the Avengers, who hadn’t left things on good terms with her last time they saw each other, having just learned of Tony’s survival and identity as Iron Man.

Before she left, Bruce pulled Tony off to the side.

“What can I do for you, Brucie-boo?”  Tony joked, and Bruce rolled his eyes.

“I wanted to get your permission to talk with Pepper about finding more doctors - actual medical doctors - who might be able to help with your pain and the burns and scars,” he said.

Tony blinked, caught off-guard for a moment.

“Uh...yeah, sure, she has some names already, but more are good too.”

Bruce nodded once, very lightly patted Tony on the back of his hand, and went to draw Pepper aside too.

Tony let out a breath, watching as Steve tried to stop Barton from teaching Darcy how to throw his kitchen knives indoors.

He didn’t know what he did to deserve these idiots.

It had to be either something really good, or really really bad.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That last line should totally be imagined being accompanied by a facepalm and a head shake.
> 
> That thing with the oven? Yeah, there’s a thing with the oven. I’m going to write a short. I just turned this fic into a series, so it’ll be added once I write it. The what-if-Tony-died short won’t be in this series though, although somehow that short seems to have taken over and it is now multi-chaptered. I don't know how that happened...
> 
> Last chapter is just a short epilogue, and is getting released now too!


	20. Epilogue: What Doesn’t Kill You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, be honest, how many of you just got the song stuck in your head? Yeah, me too. I’m sorry. XD
> 
> Sorry, this is short, just had to throw this in there because...I’m me.

Tony was in the middle of starting JARVIS on a thorough hacking of SHIELD’s servers, after finding something odd in a cursory glance through their files, which they regularly did to maintain Tony’s secrets from the rest of the world, when Pepper stopped by with some files for him, the medical doctors Bruce had asked about.

Tony left JARVIS looking into something called Insight, and headed to Bruce’s lab.

The other man was hunched over his notes, scribbling something furiously when Tony waltzed in.

“Hey, got a sec, big guy?”

Bruce glanced up, finishing his thought and putting down the pen.

“Sure, Tony, what’s wrong?”

Tony rolled his eyes.

“Nothing’s wrong.  Pepper brought by the files you wanted.  I don’t know why she didn't just give them to you directly, I think she wanted us both to look at them.  You free now?”

Bruce pushed aside his notes carefully and pushed his glasses up when they threatened to slip down a little.

“Sure, pull over a chair.”

Tony sat and plopped down the small stack of files, then began flipping through them.

“I don’t really know any of these names, even though Pepper and I looked up all the burn specialists we could find.  Cho...Hansen...huh, I knew a Hansen in college once, I think.  Let’s look at this one,” he rambled, pulling one file out and opening it.

Bruce scooted up in his chair and started to read.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahahahahaha this is basically just easter eggs. If there are any shorts you really want to read in this ‘verse, tell me in the comments or on Tumblr!
> 
> I’ll be publishing a few various shorts, including some I’ve promised in the notes in this fic, while I’m skeletoning the next longer fic.  
> Those polls are still mostly tied, so I may do either, but I’m inclined to go with the one that’s been slightly ahead most of the time, unless there’s some awful plot hole I haven’t predicted.
> 
> Now is the best time to send me prompts if you want to, as I’m not in the middle of any large fics, and have time on my hands! Once again, my tumblr is tiredtypingandtea, you can send me prompts there or in any of the comments (FYI my Tumblr is also listed on my AO3 profile). I hope to see you guys in my future fics, thanks for taking this ride with Tony and I!
> 
> (Also, in case anyone didn’t see it, I’ve turned this fic into a series. Some of the shorts going up will be in it, but not that what-if-Tony-died one, because that’s not going to fit with this premise. Unless I end up writing another one which does, but that’s not the plan at the moment.)


End file.
